Treasures

I wrote this post last year and transferred it here from another blog I had on WordPress.

January 2018

I have this room above our garage. It's connected to my "office" in our home. The room is not insulated, although the door that connects and separates our rooms is a good, sturdy steel door - the cool air or warm air, depending on the season, impacts the temperature of my study. After a couple of years of this, we decided that insulating the garage attic is the highest priority on our list.

As a result of this upcoming project, I've been cleaning out the room. It has to be cleared before the insulation is blown in and installed. We need to remove some of the plywood we used for makeshift walls. Since Christmas, I've been pulling in a box every night and going through it. Many of these boxes are boxes I haven't touched since I moved from college to my first apartment in Indianapolis, or my second apartment in Frankfort. Then, other boxes contain my college memories —lovely memories of friends, roommates, classes, and wistful memories of a beloved ex... and I get lost in them for hours. A historian by craft, I am grateful that I didn't throw anything out then, and undoubtedly, I probably never will.

I have boxes of baby clothes that, when I look through them, bring back memories of when my children were that little. The outfits that are "brand new" that the kids either didn't like wearing, or grew out of them so quickly, they had little time to even try them on. Then there are the outfits, generally fleece sleepers, that are so worn that the footies are thin. I think back to when they were little and they would run around the house in them, or scoot down the stairs, and I would get lost for hours in those boxes.

I have boxes that are collections of things just "thrown together." Last winter, I recall searching for a box of cookie tins to store my holiday baking carefully before taking the treats to my brother's house for a party. I encountered a gooey mess of water and ice, along with pictures and papers, all stuck together or ruined because of this icy disaster. Digging deeper, I discovered that some items were covered in mold. This box was a plastic box with an air-tight lid. What could have happened? Unpacking it and throwing items in the trash one by one, I found the culprit—a busted snow globe of Paris. I was crestfallen. In our haste to pack up boxes and move from our house, which sold quickly and unexpectedly, I packed up my daughter's room. She had a box of pictures in her closet, and I added additional items to it - including this snow globe I had brought back to her from Paris. In the frosty attic room, it probably froze and busted our first winter here, then cooked, making them soft and sticky that summer in the attic oven.

This winter, I am cleaning out those boxes. Unfortunately, it's one of the coldest winters on record. We've had stretches of nights with temperatures well below zero. I had thought that I had removed all the "potentially hazardous" boxes containing liquid items, but I was mistaken. I uncovered another box that smelled suspiciously "nice" when I removed the lid. In it, I discovered a trove of tax returns and a busted plastic bottle of essential oil. Ce la vie. Luckily, nothing was lost or ruined that holds any memorable importance. I can deal without the tax returns. If you know me, I have them saved on an external hard drive, in case I ever need to access them.

While going through the boxes, I get lost in the context of my life; my own history. There are so many memories; so many pictures, so many souvenirs. I have memories from my trips to New York City, Alaska, Boston, Rhode Island, New Hampshire, Vermont and Maine... and from experiences, such as from the time I belonged to a reenactment group! I have fond memories from my time teaching at the gifted and talented camp at Washington College and from my student teaching experience. I have pictures and artifacts, including train tickets, boarding passes, and museum ticket stubs, from my trips to Germany, Switzerland, and France. I have visited France three times. I had almost forgotten that until I saw the travel journal entries. I have love letters. I have notebooks from college history classes where I doodled in the margins and wrote "to-do lists." It's a habit I still do today. I am grateful that they haven't been ruined by hasty packing during moves.

I worry about all the memories that have not been preserved in our digital age. Even as a historian and someone who "saves everything," I am also guilty of this. Instead of printing pictures, we post them on social media - digitally share them and keep them on our phones until we run out of space and dump them. There are few records of pictures anymore unless you take the time to print them. I worry about all the journals that are no longer kept in neat notebooks or on legal pads. With Twitter and Google Docs, if anyone journals anymore, they can be quickly deleted in haste or embarrassment. And if that person passes away, could anyone print their digital records for preservation?

One lesson learned is for sure: I am protecting the memories that have been spared. They are now in new boxes and folders, and they are stored away from any liquids or materials that can melt. I plan to keep them safe in the insulated and dry study of mine, alongside other photo boxes containing pictures of my children and recent travel (so yes, I still print most pictures out!). I look forward to the memories that this upcoming year will provide, and I promise that in true archival fashion, I will safeguard them for years to come.