My Corner Of The Attic

My parents recently produced two boxes of stuff they pulled from the storage space under their house, jam-packed with things that I wrote as a kid…..journals, stories, reports, papers, children’s books—even a series of picture books with no discernible plot, other than to depict and describe the members of a Duggar-like mega-family at different ages of their lives.  Literally reams of old accordion-style computer paper, illustrating this extensive cast of siblings with names and ages written below each character (ex: Melanie, 9), each one holding or wearing articles that identified his/her hobbies—a violin, a basketball, karate garb.  Subsequent sequels would show pictures of the same kids 2 years later (ex: Melanie, 11), and then again, a few years after that (ex: Melanie, 15), every character clinging with steadfast determination to whatever defined them in their original portrait.  You or I might’ve abandoned our childhood aspirations to become astronauts and neurosurgeons--but if “Melanie” liked violin, basketball, and karate at 9, you could be sure that trajectory would culminate in an elite karate master who took time off from Julliard to medal in basketball at the Olympics.

Despite a few heart-warming gems (from what was apparently an extremely prolific period)--much of what I found in these boxes was quite literally garbage—scraps of paper with single sentences on them, phone trees from old cheerleading squads, notes passed during French class, kitty cat calendars from the late '90s with balloons drawn on people’s birthdays in Magic Marker.  It was, on the one hand, a frightening window into latent hoarding behaviors, characterized by an obvious inability to throw away any words on paper that I had once found meaningful for whatever reason.  But on the on other hand, it was an exercise in becoming reacquainted with my younger self—a person who loved to write.  And who wrote a LOT.

The idea of my personal time capsule sitting under my parents’ house for almost 20 years reminded me of the classic Whiskeytown song where a guy unexpectedly finds “a bunch of letters… in a box labeled ‘Tinsel and Lights’” while wandering around in the “northwest corner of the attic”.  For those of you unfamiliar with “Houses on the Hill”, the letters were from the guy who “broke your mama’s heart” by dying in the war. You’re then led to imagine this whole alternate universe that mama once inhabited before dad or the kids ever came along. While nothing so mind-blowing was uncovered in my own set of souvenirs, it was like unearthing fossils of a former passion that I’ve been gradually burying since college.  An act that used to fill nearly every quiet moment of my youth now makes only intermittent cameos in the form of lengthy birthday card inscriptions, Mother’s and Father’s Day messages, wedding toasts, little stories for friends’ kids or my speech therapy students, and random essays to myself tucked away in the Notes app on my phone.  That Notes app, my hard drive, my gmail archive, my file folders of work projects, those hoarded writings from under my parents’ house—are ongoing contributions to my own mislabeled box of keepsakes from a forgotten love, hidden in the far corner of nowhere.  

I could continue keeping these things to myself and leave them to be stumbled across by my adult children after my passing as the song describes…. But my current passwords already change monthly and incorporate such a convoluted combination of numbers, letters, emoticons, and hieroglyphs that I already struggle to keep track of them.  Give internet security a few more decades and I’m sure unlocking my personal documents will be more like an episode of CSI, involving a tedious process of matching retinal scans, finger prints, and blood samples to all of my digital hiding places.  Combine that with the additional scavenger hunt of sifting through the scattered scraps of paper I’ve squirreled away old-school style and the fate of my “lost love” seems pretty uncertain.  Depending on which side wins the toss, genetically speaking, our poor boys may also inherit my dearth of technical savvy and general lack of motivation for problem-solving…in which case, I should probably take it upon myself to better organize that scribbled legacy and just start a blog like Ray’s been telling me to do forever.

I’m aware that I’m SO late to this party.  In almost-daily attempts to deter my 2-year-old’s nervous breakdown by finding out when the next episode of Bubble Guppies comes on, I’ve repeatedly scrolled across a kids’ show entitled Dog With A Blog.  I’m pretty sure that’s when you know you’ve missed the boat on a particular medium--when literally everyone and, in fact, their dog is filling cyberspace with wit and wisdom.  I’m a mom and a speech therapist, who likes to write about things.  The internet is already pretty saturated with moms who make you laugh and cry with charming tales from parenthood, speech pathologists who churn out clever little stories for their therapy kids, and of course, those ordinary people who just like to write and share it with the world (for better or worse).  My “brand” has certainly been covered.  Extensively.  But since I done did the work already, might as well let my little light shine.

So here we are.  I’ll be staying at home with my kids for the next year, and--between wiping bottoms, mopping up urine from failed attempts at potty-training, preparing nutritious meals my kids then pepper the hardwoods with, and having the theme song to every show on Nick Junior permanently imprinted in my auditory cortex—I plan to start gradually uploading material.  Much like a drama kid with the ancillary role of “Pine Tree” in the school play, I know my audience will consist almost exclusively of family and friends—in which case, you may even recognize a handful of things you come across.  Nothing technologically fancy in the presentation, of course.  Just the standard vanilla template hung in a slightly more prominent quadrant of the world’s attic, where I can picture a middle-aged “Melanie” sitting cross-legged in her karate jacket, with her basketball and violin somehow propped under one arm, diligently unpacking a box whose label has nothing to do with its contents.