"And the rockets' red glare, the bombs bursting in air..."

I have spent the bulk of this long holiday weekend – with Thursday thrown in, too – cleaning out the storage room in the attic.

Cleaning out part of the storage room in the attic.

Going through stuff in the storage room in the attic.

I feel as though I have not really done very much.

Have only made a slight dent.

At the same time, there are ten bulging black garbage bags full of “stuff” out by the trash cans. As well as two huge moving boxes filled with dozens of empty boxes I broke down one by one using nothing but a Pampered Chef paring knife. On top of it all is a vaporizer from the 1960s, well used by my sister who always seemed to have colds and coughs as a child, in its original box.

These past three days, I have gone through about a hundred boxes. Condensed some. Reorganized some. Put some contents into new boxes. Rearranged and restacked other boxes.

And purged, purged, purged.

I have finally located some of the items I never could find when we first moved here five years ago.

And I stumbled upon multiple blasts from my past. And my sister’s past. And my parents’ past.

I found baby pictures of my mom. Pictures of her with her old boyfriends during WWII. Photos of my mother’s parents when they were incredibly young and in love. A stunning photo of my grandmother from 1923, standing alone, the wind blowing her dress, by some large body of water. It looks like an ocean, but my mom thinks it is more likely Lake Erie.

A box of family heirlooms that my father’s sister’s estate sent me after my aunt passed away in 1998, the same year my dad, her older brother, died. I only scratched the surface, but found locks of children’s hair, hand scrawled letters to Santa Claus from all of the brothers and sisters, homemade birthday cards and Father’s Day cards, school notebooks, photos, and a letter my dad wrote his dad from Wabash College when he was barely 18, telling his dad how he had thought things over and he now had a whole new view of his father and the kind of man he really was. He said he was going to try to get into West Point and become an Army officer. He wrote: “you can make good money in the Army, too (this was in the middle of the Great Depression when his father was struggling to support a family of seven as a traveling salesman) – why, a general can make as much as $13, 500!”

I found photo albums of my ex-husband and me when we were first married. Of high school and West Point and the Army. I finally found the photos of my West Point roommate who passed away suddenly this past December at age 44 from a rare autoimmune disease. There we were out at Camp Buckner as brand new yearlings, still wearing old Army green fatigues, and posing for the “best summer of our lives.”

Drawings my children had made when they were toddlers. A scrapbook from some sort of brainwashing Vacation Bible School my one son must have gone to with crayon drawings of him and Jesus and his brother climbing trees and playing at the playground. Poems my older son had “written” in preschool. A short story by my younger son about a teenaged guitar player who had long black hair and brown eyes and was “about 5 or 6 feet tall” and wanted to start his own band.

A box of short stories and essays I had presented to my parents the Christmas of my senior year in high school – for them to keep always!

A waffle iron from the 1950s, old Easter bonnets, Jackie Kennedy’s pill box hats (well, they were probably my mother’s pill box hats), my sister’s drawing table and innumerable art projects in just about every conceivable medium. Cigar boxes and glass jars of nails and tacks and screws and nuts and bolts. Old sheets and placemats and linen tablecloths and napkins. My wedding dress, preserved for eternity in a special box. Old golf clubs, badminton racquets, a baseball bat. Books, books, and more books. And still more books.

You know, once you start moving things around and opening up boxes and pulling stuff out, you start making an even bigger mess than was there originally.

Or so it seemed.

After I rolled them down two flights of stairs, I made myself carry out the heavy, full bags of trash one by one to the garage, so I would feel like I was accomplishing something.

I loaded my car up with seven stuffed bags of outgrown (or undergrown) but still perfectly good clothes from my children and me, drove down to my mother’s church, and squeezed them one by one through the slot in the St. Vincent de Paul box. Acts of penance; surely a priest or a nun would walk by and notice my generosity.

There was part of me that thought I should have just rented a giant dumpster, opened up the attic window, and just started dumping shit out the window without even looking at it or going through it.

This job was endless!

There was another part of me that got bogged down, sifting through old letters and papers and photo albums. Snooping into people’s former lives. My former lives. I could spend years going through all of this stuff, reading or, in some cases, re-reading letters, discovering someone’s treasures, flipping through photos of several families’ special moments.

I am tired. I am stiff. I am dusty and sweaty. I have paper cuts on my hands. My lower back and shoulders are killing me. My hair has frizzed up into a mop of curls from the heat and humidity. I am dusty and dirty. And dying to take a shower. Or a long hot bath. And have a stiff, cold drink.

I have seen things I had forgotten about. I have seen things I never knew about. I have seen things I would rather not have. I have seen things that touched my heart and made me cry. And made me say, “Oh, my!”

My life flashing before my eyes. Or my whole family’s lives flashing before my eyes.

And I have only just begun….