Grandma's Treasures in the Attic

Why we don't call it 'junk'

I cleaned out the closet in our guest room yesterday and it took the better part of the day to do it.  When I was finished, I had a full trash bag and two large piles of stuff on the floor in front of me. 

One pile was stuff we would sell in our community garage sale this fall.  The other pile was stuff I could never part with, not in a million years.  We don’t have a walk up attic, so those things I will probably have to find a home for again, back in the guest room closet.

It’s interesting, how we hold onto things, whether they are needed or not. There are feelings and emotions attached to them and they mean something to us, which makes them bigger than life.  I guess it’s that way, because we’re human.

When I was in junior high school, I followed my grandmother up the long flight of stairs to her attic. There was so much stuff up there and I remember it had an ‘old’ musty smell that lived up there and it surrounded me.

I asked her why she didn’t throw away all, or at least some of that junk.  Grandma smiled and gave me a hug along with my first lesson on why we keep things, even when we don’t need them anymore.

She shared stories about old dresses that took her to special dances, or the wedding gown she wore down the aisle with Grampa; an old-fashioned stereo-graph that her grandfather had been so proud of along with eight wax records for it in a wooden box; a pile of yellowed piano sheet music, in case she ever wanted to play the piano again.

Right beside the music was a basket of dried rose bouquets Grampa had given her through the years –“How can I ever get rid of the roses?  She asked, but I knew it was only a rhetorical question. I was beginning to understand …

Several steamer trunks lined a wall on the right.  They had traveled across the ocean from Ireland with our relatives on big ships. One trunk held old picture albums full of those same relatives. I didn’t know any of them, but Grandma did. She knew all of their names and how we were related.

In another trunk was a shoe box full of old love letters my grandfather wrote to her when he was away at war. They were all tied together with faded ribbon. She said she could never part with them because they held all of his private thoughts and his love for her.

Then Grandma pulled a small purple box from one of the trunks. Inside, was her favorite picture of Mama when she was young and at a beach with Daddy on their honeymoon.

The photo was crackled, its corners bent, but there she was, my Mama. A bandana tied around her head held her wayward curls in the stiff ocean breeze. Her pants were rolled up mid-calf, and the cuffs were just barely skimming the waves that were teasing her. She looked so happy.

How I wish I had known her then, so young and pretty, living carefree in a world filled with Daddy, before children and cancer.  Grandma carefully put the picture back in the purple box and handed it to me. “Cathy Jo, let this be the first of many things you will keep forever that isn’t junk.”

From an old steamer trunk I was given a treasure, something I would keep forever to remind me of love that had so shaped my life.

How terribly I still miss her.

Poet/Writer/Author of 5 books.
Quora Top Writer 2018.
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