The attic was hot, very dusty in a way that attics full of boxes can be, and peculiarly exciting. My family has usually succeeded in resisting an alarming tradition, that of getting rid of everything a relative owned as soon as possible after his or her death. When my mom died three summers ago, all her stuff got packed into boxes and taken to the attic of my sister’s house in Milwaukee. Now my sister was moving and my mother’s possessions needed to be dealt with.
Like many children of the great depression, my mother did not throw many things away. (In her later years, she became a little obsessive-compulsive about it. Thus, when her home got cleaned out and the contents packed away some months before she died, 36 boxes of cereal were found. We did not save those.)
She was an inveterate letter writer all her life — a friend notes that it is a good thing she never learned about the Internet or e-mail — and she had correspondence with many people, some famous and some puzzling. Now, going through her things, we found lengthy exchanges with persons we’d never heard of, some going on for decades. We also found nice personal letters from, for instance, Eleanor Roosevelt and Richard Nixon, from the early 1960s.
We also discovered file folders with labels such as “Publishers Clearing House” — she apparently considered junk mail to be personal, and she would sometimes send a personal reply. (Suddenly I think how funny it would have been had she used e-mail. She would have driven the poor Nigerian scammers crazy explaining how the $3.9 million they say she inherited was not rightly hers.)
The deeper we dug, the more delight we found amid the mundane. Here was a box containing her collection of political buttons, going back to the 1800s. There, at the bottom of a box that probably hadn’t been opened since her move to Florida 40 years ago, was a plaster plaque of a noble-looking American Indian, bronzed, that on the back had penciled: “George H. Honig sculptor Feb 25 - 1928 First plaster copy to Eugene Powell.” Eugene Powell was my father, and George H. Honig was a fairly famous sculptor in Indiana, Illinois, and Kentucky the first two-thirds of the 20th century.
There were photographs and photographic negatives going back to the time when that medium was new — none of them with any indication as to who or what was depicted. A few of the people we recognize but most we do not.
It was all pretty much jumbled together, so pristine Roseville pottery that had adorned my grandparents’ home was nestled up against some modern plastic item that my mom, always the saver, had decided was “too good to throw out.” Pre-Columbian black-glazed pottery was given equal standing with some novelty coffee cup, its handle broken off.
There, too, was our childhood, items that had been all around our house as we grew up, some that we hadn’t seen for decades.
The sorting and repacking took days, but they were days filled with laughter and recognition, days filled with speculation and the search for clues as to the missing couple of decades of our father’s life — he had been married twice and apparently divorced before meeting my mother, and we have a half-brother we’ve met once and a half-sister we’ve never met. This was never discussed in our house, and we’ve always wanted to get to the bottom of it. Perhaps some of the photographs will provide a glimpse.
We found that as we went through it all and repacked it for moving that we, too, threw away little. It was all a time capsule, dozens of time capsules, really, from my great grandfather’s G.A.R. medals from different “encampments” to photographs of family vacations in ages past. Some items were mysteries while others were just the thing to trigger a flood of memories.
Finally we brought all the stuff, newly boxed, down the too-narrow stairs to be taken to its new locations, some packed away for my other sister, some put in storage, some coming home with me.
Weary and sore — we were not as young as the activities and items had led us to remember being — and now coughing and sneezing, infected with the dust that only time can produce, we were satisfied. I picked up and still cannot play the wooden fife that piped Company G, 81st Indiana Volunteer Infantry, into battle at Stone Mountain, Chickamauga, and Atlanta. We wondered what possessed my mom to purchase (fairly recently; it is the current model) a Hohner “Blues Harp” harmonica.
Mostly, though, we were grateful and content. The contentment came from a renewed sense of family, place, and history, a new and solid footing at the living edge of an amusing and gratifying family history.
The gratitude was to our mother and our forbears, for never having thrown anything away. Even silly little things, the numerous hat pins and shoe button hooks, advertising buttons from shoe companies and farm implement makers, all made those ancestors more real, more alive.
And, happily, just a little nutty.
Dennis E. Powell is crackpot-at-large to Open for Business. Powell was an award-winning reporter in New York and elsewhere before moving to Ohio and becoming a full-time crackpot. You can reach him at dep@drippingwithirony.com.