There is a box sitting on the floor by my desk, a little 10.5×5.5×6.5 thing with priority mail stickers, some duct tape, and both addresses (recipient and return) more than two years out of date. I don’t remember what it was that Mom sent me in this box, but whatever it was has been sorted and processed and has found another home.
When I moved out of the dorms for the first time, moving back home for the summer, this was the box that small things ended up in. Odds and ends. That summer I left it sitting unopened in Dad’s basement, bringing out some items when I returned to school in the fall, and storing the rest on the top shelf in my closet.
It’s moved back and forth several more times now, and it has become the receptacle for small, precious things.
At the top are the Pencil Bird and the Bat Spork. These two creations are awaiting installation in my room, hanging from the ceiling over the door and from the center of the light, respectively, and attached by thread and paperclip pulleys to the door to the hallway and the door to the bathroom.
Below them is a stack of photographs my mom sent me after I first left for college. A few of my friends and I are sitting in the hammock in her back yard, and my sister is saying goodbye as my family gets ready to drive back home leaving me to start college. I felt like I was getting left, but in retrospect I’m the one who left her behind.
Then there is a stack of photographs I took in China. These are my favorites from the album. My kids–they will always be my kids–were a group of brilliant high school students with spectacular english skills. My primary job at the camp was to get them talking in english, to me and to each other, and to provide an example of an American accent. I taught one of the morning public speaking classes. They were preparing short speeches on their dreams for the future. Every one of them wants to make the world a better place. I believe they will.
Beneath those are letters and cards from every sort of occasion. A plethora of holidays are represented, Valentines, Halloween, and half a dozen others.
Under the letters is a collapsable origami star I made on April 30th 2010 as something to keep my hands busy and something to remember by. It was a hard night for many of us–I had it easier than many. I wasn’t close to him, just expected that given more time we would be friends, and now there was no more time. It was hard that summer when I was asked how my semester had gone. Everything was fantastic, except… that one thing that outweighed everything else.
Under that is a handful of sticky notes with sketches on them, my acorn puppet man, and a stuffed Ewok given to me by a friend. There’s also a deck of playing cards (missing a few digits), a paper mache mask, site tokens from half a dozen SCA events, a string of mardi gras beads and a set of 3×4 illustrations of characters from The Hobbit that I drew last fall. There is also a plastic dinosaur, an armored rubber duck, a quarter, a handful of twigs, a few dried up leaves, and a buckeye.
Carefully tucked into the side is the program from my grandpa’s funeral, printed with poems he wrote about his boys and all their little girls. I helped Grandma pick the photo of the four oldest granddaughters, so much younger then, sitting in the back of the pickup and smiling. We were all smiling again, in matching yellow dresses, when the four oldest cousins, now joined by another three girls and one lonely boy, sat in the front row at our uncle’s wedding a few weeks ago.
These odds and ends, these memories, some seemingly worthless, some bittersweet, and some bringing up smiles from old times and promoting laughter at the inside joke that made a doodle a keepsake, this little cardboard box–This box has never been forgotten in my packing, even when essentials have. I have suffered weeks without a pillow, and days without a proper toothbrush, but this box has never been misplaced.