Treasures and Trash: Down Memory Lane

In our decluttering plan, I assigned my husband to clean the basement. Most of the things down there are his, so that made sense to me. Plus, the unfinished portion of our basement is known for harboring large spiders, and I have arachnophobia. He has been slow to get to this portion of his assignment, and we are approaching the drop-dead date.

There is one old trunk in the basement that has followed me from college to law school to Kansas City. I thought it might hold some of my stuff—copies of my law review note, for example. I didn’t want hubby throwing away my things (which he has done in the past), so I decided last week that I would brave the cobwebs and examine the trunk.

The first challenge was to find the key. I thought I knew where it was—in a desk I rarely use any more. No cobwebs in my brain on this point, and I successfully opened the trunk.

From there it was an exercise in archeology.

The top layer consisted of two ancient plaid bedspreads. They were in my husband’s bedroom when he was a kid. He and I haven’t used them since 1982 when our son was born. At that point, we moved my husband’s childhood bunk beds into our baby’s room. I bought new bedspreads for the beds, and that’s when these plaid spreads must have retired to the trunk.

Below the bedspreads were notebooks and boxes full of papers—specifically, my school papers dating back to about the fourth grade. There were archives from my grade school, junior high, high school, college, and law school years—class photographs, newspaper clippings, projects, class notes, blue book exams, term papers, yearbooks, memorabilia, and, yes, about thirty copies of my law review note.

The trunk also contained two Oriental tea sets and a copy paper box full of my husband’s childhood mementos.

How all this stuff came to be lodged in the trunk, I have no idea. Everything was packed quite neatly, in almost Euclidean perfection, which makes me think my husband packed the trunk. I would more likely have crammed things in however I could.

As I’ve found with past decluttering projects, the trunk contained treasures and trash.

Among the treasures I found:

• My high school yearbooks, with all the inane comments that high school students write in other people’s yearbooks.
• The science project I did with my father in the seventh grade (I got the title wrong in my recent post about this project. The correct title was “The Chemical Activity of Metals.”)
• A variety of poems and stories I wrote for various classes in junior high, high school, and college (I doubt I’ll ever use them, but I couldn’t throw them out—at least not until I read them again)
• The blue book in which my professor downgraded me from an A minus to a B plus (though I didn’t see the blue book in which he upgraded me from an A minus to a solid A)

And among the trash:

• Copies of student newspapers from grade school, junior high, and high school. (I didn’t care that much that the basketball team went to State when I was in high school—why did I preserve the newspaper edition announcing the fact?)
• A balloon, now dessicated, that I was given to mark my induction into National Honor Society
• Class notes from college and law school classes—I haven’t thought about many of these classes since taking the final exam. The notes were all neatly organized—the college notes by subject matter (all the Economics classes together, e.g.) and the law school notes by semester (still in the multi-subject notebooks I used each term).

I kept the law school notes because I thought they might be useful when I was practicing law. But I have no idea why I kept most of the rest of it.

I have some vague recollection of thinking that someday I’d want to reflect back on my high school years. But I wasn’t very happy during high school, and my feelings now are more wistful than joyful as I think back on that era of my life—wishing I’d done more, gone to more social events, made better use of the opportunities I had, and kept in touch with more people after graduation.

Twice in my distant past I culled through these papers and memorabilia. In the summer after I graduated from college and before I went to law school, I’m pretty sure I organized all my college papers. And in the summer after law school, when I thought my parents might relocate in the year ahead, I went through all the things in my childhood bedroom. I threw out a lot at that time.

But almost a trunkful of memorabilia survived. Until now.

Last week I threw out about ninety percent of the papers in the trunk, put the bedspreads and tea sets aside to donate to a thrift shop, and packed the little I kept in a banker’s box. That’s all that’s left of my childhood now, and most of the box is filled with the yearbooks.

My husband now has to deal with his own box of memorabilia. And then we’ll get rid of the trunk.

What archeology digs have you done in your home?