My mind looks like the houses that are featured on the television show about hoarders. It's true! I have a trunk inside my head! My family of five (husband and three single adult children) has moved thirty times during my twenty-five years of marriage, so we are very selective about what possessions we take with us. We have given away furniture, appliances, collectibles, etc; but we have also lost priceless photo albums, homemade quilts, sentimental gifts and rare books. Someone once made the comment that our family never really lived in a home, we just served house terms. That is not the life I wanted! I longed for the "Father of the Bride" life, where you live in the same great house all your life. The first boy that dated our middle daughter still has that life. He is twenty-four years old, and he has lived in the same "perfect" house since he was a baby. Not us.
After our second move, downsizing from a beautiful suburban home to a 100-year-old shack, something wonderful happened in my life. I was gifted with a touch of fairy dust in the bright yellow bedroom of that small cabin, and my depleted life was transformed by an idea that came out of empty space. The idea was the Tomorrow Trunk.
I had been a newspaper editor for seven years until my two younger children were born a year apart. At the time of the move, the ages of my children were four, five and ten. I had begun writing a journal as a transitional form of therapy, and despite all the adjustments of the move, something magical began to envelop me. I bought an old wicker trunk, similar to a hope chest or trousseau, and I tucked away notes, ideas, letters, quotes, observations, and stacks of stories. I think it was a blog, but in a different format.
I assigned stories to every event, situation and circumstance, much the way editors assign their reporters to cover the daily news. I took one or two events of the day or week, typed them into story form, and stuffed them into the trunk for the sake of my three children. I described it to my friends and family as the perfect inheritance - a dowry of devotion! The priceless contents of the Tomorrow Trunk cannot be fought over divided. Therein lies the magic - the treasure - the true wealth. The value of this literary estate is measured by its altruistic ability to multiply as one generation of children shares it with the next.
I am a hoarder, but not of doll collections or baseball gloves or souvenirs. I am a hoarder of stories - bad ones and good ones, highs and lows, funny and sad. Thanks to a brush of genius, I am a woman possessed. I have been collecting the stories of my children for almost twenty years. The following is a note taken from the Tomorrow Trunk, as the idea began to manifest:
I am amazed at how much I have not understood about human behavior. My children are still very young, and I am overwhelmed at how much time and money I spend buying and saving things that benefit them so little as they grow older - most of which they end up throwing away or selling as rummage. Even photographs lose their appeal with time, unless accompanied by a good story. I want the Tomorrow Trunk to be filled with pages and pages of the stuff you keep - the stories. This is the place where yesterday becomes tomorrow, and the lives of my young children connect one day with the lives of their own children. The is my Tomorrow Trunk filled with today!"
After thirty moves, we have definitely lost a lot of stuff, but I don't think we have lost a single story.
Dianne ; )
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