This Side Up

Unpacking memories and making new ones

John Howell
Posted 7/14/15

It was like Christmas on a grand scale. The boxes were waist-high and taped shut. The kids looked on anxiously as I took the kitchen knife and ran it along the seam. The lid popped free, exposing …

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This Side Up

Unpacking memories and making new ones

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It was like Christmas on a grand scale. The boxes were waist-high and taped shut. The kids looked on anxiously as I took the kitchen knife and ran it along the seam. The lid popped free, exposing wads of paper. It was bunched up, looking like popcorn.

I pulled off the first layer, dropping it on the floor. Next was an object not larger than a baseball that had been rolled in the white paper. It was the first of many treasures. I unrolled the paper to reveal a yellow tumbler, which I slid on the dining room table.

“How cool,” exclaimed Ellie, my niece’s daughter.

“Can we help?” asked my grandson, Eddy.

As soon as I said yes, the kids gathered around the box. There were another eight or nine boxes stacked in the corner of the room. There was a lot of unwrapping to do if we were going to complete this project.

The kids were waiting for my command.

“OK,” I said, “you can unwrap, but whatever you’re unwrapping I want you to hold it carefully and put it on the floor before you start. There’s a lot of china and glasses and we don’t want to break anything.”

Eagerly, the kids dove into the box. They followed my instructions. The excitement was running high, and I could see this could easily turn into a race. The air was crackling with the sound of paper.

“This is beautiful,” announced my granddaughter, Lucy, holding up a crystal-cut decanter. The rest of the gang looked up, but only briefly. They were too intent on unveiling the next item.

Lucy placed the decanter on the table with its growing array of glasses of different sizes and shapes to cups and saucers and glass candlestick holders.

“Look, look,” my granddaughter Sydney shouted. Everyone stopped to see what she had. She held up a small ceramic pig, a saltshaker. No question, this was the best find of the morning so far.

I don’t remember seeing the pig before, but everything else was familiar. It should have been. Less than a week earlier, a packing crew went through my father’s house in Connecticut. In less than eight hours they stripped bare what had been a home for more than 50 years. Much sorting had already been done by my sister and brother-in-law, and together during a weekend in May we went through closets, sorting and bagging clothes, cleaning out shelves of books and filling a small dumpster with stuff and more stuff.

I found myself wondering what my father planned to do with some of it. He was a practical man and there would have been a purpose to saving things. So many items brought back memories. We uncovered a trove of cigarette lighters, some bearing my mother’s initials. There were pipes and a couple of boxes of cigars. Both of my parents gave up smoking decades before their deaths, but as clear as if it was yesterday, I had images of my father using his special v-shaped clipper to snip the end of a cigar before holding it close to a flame and inhaling, or my mother’s unfinished cigarettes, an end red with lipstick, balanced on an ashtray.

The moving company and their packing crew was the final assault. They would haul most of the furniture, scores of paintings, lamps and the contents of the kitchen and pantry cupboards to upstate New York and the house my sister and I now jointly own.

In time most of the items would go to our children and their children. They could decide what to do with them. For now, they would be in New York.

There is a burden to all this “stuff” and yet an attachment made so real by memories.

For the kids, this was an adventure. The glasses and plates were just glasses and plates. They were excited to discover what was in the next wad of paper and the next. The unwrapping continued at a fast pace. Children dove into the boxes, paper mounted like a snow bank around them. Space on the dining room table was becoming scarce. Carol found additional room in the pantry and the question of where all of this was going to go, and whether we should keep it nagged at me. There wasn’t time to ponder, however. There were fun things to do.

Sydney stood in the pile of wrapping paper. It was waist high. She let herself fall. Ellie was watching. She jumped into the pile. Eddy joined her, as did his sister Lucy. The rest of the kids joined in, a total of seven. They were waving their arms, throwing the paper up and letting it cover them as they rolled on the floor. It was better than a mound of leaves.

Eddy was the first to think of it. He wadded up a handful of paper and threw it like a snowball. Soon they were all doing it.

Eddy climbed into a box. It was now a fort. The others fired. Papers were strewn across the room.

I won’t forget the scene. I wonder if the kids will.

Might the “beautiful” decanter evoke the memory of the wrapping paper battle of a rainy summer morning 20 and 30 years from now? Might the ceramic pig hold a revered place on a mantle?

They surely had an attachment to my parents, but now they new meaning, and somehow discovering them, unwrapping them, gave them special power.

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