Opening the Box

My wife stopped me as I walked past her chair. She had a box open in front of her and couldn't wait to show me what she had found.

Her brother had recently given it to her. It had belonged to their mother, and since her death many years ago, he had kept it safely stored away. Now it seemed the time had come for it to belong to his sister.

The box was full of treasures.

There were recipes saved by my wife's grandmother, an old, corny letter from an Arkansas mother to her son in Oklahoma, some of my wife's grammar school papers, and countless other keepsakes. To anyone else, they might have seemed ordinary.

To my wife, they were priceless.

I read some of the papers while she told me the stories behind them. I especially enjoyed watching the delight on her face as one memory led to another. Before long, though, I realized I was only a visitor.

These were her memories.

Not mine.

Bits of nostalgia only work if you know the whole story.

As I watched her turning one treasure after another in her hands, I couldn't help thinking about the box in my own closet.

It holds photographs, letters, postcards, and other keepsakes from my college years. Every few years I pull it down from the shelf and spend a little time looking through it.

I've shown some of the photographs to my wife. She listens with interest, just as I listened to her.

But she wasn't there either.

She knows the stories only because I tell them.

The last time I opened my box, I read a few of the letters. They stirred memories I had long ago chosen to leave behind. I found myself asking a question I had never considered before.

Why do I save things I don't really want to remember?

I don't know.

That day I threw much of it away.

It didn't feel like losing something. If anything, it felt like recognizing something that had already happened.

I wonder if something changes as we grow older.

Perhaps we save these things because they once helped tell the story of who we were. Then, almost without noticing, we become someone else. The memories remain, but they no longer ask to be carried in quite the same way.

Or perhaps opening an old box isn't really about remembering the past.

Perhaps opening an old box is one of the ways we discover who we have become.

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