The Trunk

Recently, I came home from one of my trips to discover that my parents had delivered this little trunk. It had lived in my bedroom throughout my childhood. When I was young, I kept china dolls and antique doll clothing in it.

I slowly filled it with letters and other mementos during my teen years. My parents put it in the attic after I finished college and there it has rested, forgotten (by me anyway). When I opened the trunk, it was full to the brim with papers from my teen years and it took me all afternoon to read through them.

The most poignant were letters from all my Grandmothers and my Mother.
There were many from those first homesick weeks of freshman year.

Every valentine I had ever received was in there,
including some hand-painted ones from my Father.

There were even snapshots sprinkled about.

I wish we still wrote letters the way we used to. It is an art that is passing us by. I have often had visions of turning Sunday afternoons into a family letter-writing time, but it has seldom happened. When I see the sloppily-written emails Helen has written to her friends and then look at the stack of letters I have from my teen friends, I wish I could turn back the clock on technology, just a little bit!