Last Night's Treasures

I am expecting to soon leave the house Michael and I bought in 2000, the house that I have lived in with our three now fledgling children since his death nine years ago. It's time to purge.

So, I've been opening box after box of stuff that Michael collected throughout his life, up until we moved to this house. Boxes that were stashed on a shelf and unopened for two decades. Much of it I am throwing away - what do I need with clippings of restaurant reviews or recipes, menus he stole from restaurants he enjoyed, photography magazines, letters from his girlfriends before me (though some these I have read), and thousands of photographs of people even he himself might not remember?

This was one of the first treasures I found last night, tucked in a box filled otherwise with newspaper clippings about restaurants and recipes. I am amazed I found it because I was pulling stuff out of that box by the handful and putting it straight into recycling. It's not first edition, which would have been worth an awful lot, but close, and in decent condition.

Finding this made me slow down with my purge of presumably useless stuff. What else might I find?

For one, I found this notebook of poems I wrote in my 20's, also placed long ago among random newspaper clippings. I see by the note in the bottom left hand corner that I had been up pretty late writing. I'm touched that Michael wanted to keep this notebook.

One little poem, written on a torn scrap of an envelope, was tucked into the notebook. I wrote it back in the day when my e's looked like backward 3's.

I still like this poem. The rest of the poems, meh.

On to another box, this one filled with newspaper wrapped breakables. Inside there were a lot of souvenirs from vacations, sculptures the kids had made in school, and this pretty rabbit, of which I have no recollection.

Inside the rabbit are all my pregnancy tests. I was forever pregnant, lucky in some ways and very very unlucky in others.

The most important find was in this beautiful stone vessel with inlaid design. It contained mostly crystals, and a tarnished but intricate silver chain. My husband loved silver chains, he loved to give silver chains as gifts, and this was likely one he had given to me.

I was very happy to find this little pot because the crystals were once important to me, and I have often wondered where they had all gone. I've had a very rough numbers of years lately, somewhere around twenty come to think of it. There is a nice chunk of rose crystal in there, and it took me straight to my mother. I had the insightful thought that maybe I am struggling so much because I am not letting enough spirit in.

But I was shocked when I rummaged through the vessel and found, buried beneath the crystals...

...Michael's wedding ring.

My mother, my husband, my marriage and myself, languishing in boxes that might have easily been thrown to the curb unopened, and that ring would have been buried under my crystals for far longer than today.

Are these good finds? I've unburied an awful lot of treasures, if treasures they be, and I am making hard like @riverflows today steadying my breath and earthing so that I am not crushed with grief.