Darcy: "It's too crowded in here with these couches."
In that vein I started in that room and the first thing I saw was the tub of keepsakes that I have inherited from my mother. All of that stuff was originally in a huge tub, but in the last month I have worked hard at whittling it down into a smaller tub which I thought would fit nicely in Madison's closet. I do not have a big house. Big houses in Florida are far and few between for middle income families, and thus my home does not have a lot of storage space. The biggest space is the closet in my daughter's bedroom and as soon as she went to college I filled it. She will tell you it was full before she left, but I rearranged things after she was gone, and anytime we had something extra that we didn't know what to do with we either shoved into Madison's closet or hauled it to The Condo, which I have taken to calling "my storage house".
I took the container of mementos that my brother and I could not ditch into Madison's room and stared into the closet. Where to put it? Where to put it? That, of course, is an igniter and the next thing I knew I was emptying the closet and rearranging once more. In the course of all of that I found my tub of keepsakes. My GIANT tub of obviously important belongings. Who remembered that I had that tub along with my filing cabinet of
This made me laugh. When I first got my license and car and started driving to school my friends wanted to hitch rides. My mother, ever the entrepreneur and saver, insisted that I charge each person that entered my vehicle. "A quarter," she said. "To pay for gas." So I attached this Sucrets box on the dash of my car on the passenger side with Velcro and each person that rode in my car put a quarter in there "for gas money". I had recently told this to Darcy who carts people hither and yon every day and who had scored a discount on voice lessons by ferrying the teacher's daughter to and from play practice. I thought the box empty, but inside were two $2 bills; an item that I found not only there, but also in my mother's box and in the box of my dad's things. I think I netted $10 all together.
This little gem is a recent addition to the container. I have keepsake containers for both my girls and I'm not sure why this wasn't in Madison's box. Both handprints were in there. I took them when Madison was I think six months old (I think it is written on the back, but I forgot to look). It was a huge pain to get them just right and not get paint all over my furniture and all over her clothes. Oh, and to keep it out of her mouth. I made these prints for a photo frame that we gave Tom for father's day complete with a picture of his daughter. It was one of my more creative endeavors with my child if not the only one. Tom kept it at the office and when he made the move into his work's new billion dollar building last year he brought the frame home. I took out the prints and saved them.
Speaking of prints...I didn't even do that on purpose either. I wrote about my love for investigation in my younger years HERE. I was a huge Nancy Drew fan (I still have all of my books) and was given this finger print kit for Christmas one year. While I don't still have the kit I did keep the book in case I ever got into the business. I also still have the homemade investigator's license that my neighbor and co-owner of our detective agency, Robby, made. It was also inside the Sucret's box with the $2 bills. I forgot to photograph that. (Hmmmm...maybe I'll have to get back into that closet to do just that....)
This is a booklet we received in grade school in 1976. I wasn't sure which grade I got this in, I thought 6th or 7th, so I Googled it and found the booklet was done in 1976 with a revised edition in 1978. I really should have taken some pictures of the inside of this book because, quite frankly, it would itself make an entire blog entry. It is hilarious and so NOT helpful. But then in my Googling I found a blog, Moms Who Drink and Swear (which made me just want to spend all day reading her), that has an entry about this same booklet. The entire book is made up of letters from a group of girlfriends writing each other about their puberty experiences, and this blogger put an excerpt from the book on her blog and it was HILARIOUS. Be aware: the blog is called Moms Who Drink and Swear.
I'm sure I kept this booklet, not because I learned anything from it, but because it was the most ridiculous thing ever for educating girls on menstruation. For sure, it is now, but I honestly can remember reading the entire booklet and feeling something, although not from the subject at hand, but more from the angst of friendship and growing up. I thought it interesting because also in the closet is a tote I won after reading THIS blog entry about periods from my fav blogger at Girls Gone Child. The difference between these two items is night and day, and well, ironic to say the least. All I can say, is thank god for progress.
(Anyone interested in the tote, let me know. It didn't work out with my daughter or the tween I wanted to give it to)
The last item I took a picture of was a cigar I kept from the last pack my dad bought. My dad was rarely without a cigar whether he was smoking it or just chewing on it. Cigars and bald heads were, and always have been, the words associated with him. Once after finagling his way into a championship tennis tournament, he sat next to Maureen Connolly Brinker, the professional Grand Slam tennis champion, and the two chatted all through the tournament. Several years later she called out to him, by name, at an airport in Pennsylvania telling him, "I'd know that cigar and bald head anywhere."
We put the cigars in the coffin with him, but I kept one for...well, who knows why, I just did. The box of Dutch Masters, above, is what houses all of the things I kept that belonged to him. I thought it fitting, I suppose.
I also thought about smoking it as a toast to keepsakes, but decided a glass of wine would be healthier. Here's to keepsakes and memories!
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