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Archiver > TNDICKSO > 1999-08 > 0934153906


From: "ace1125" <>
Subject: [TNDICKSO-L] Sunday Rockin'
Date: Sun, 8 Aug 1999 19:11:46 -0400


Afternoon all,
All this yarn spinnin got me thinkin about Pa's attic... my oh my the things
in that attic...now it is true hadda catch my daddy gone and talk one of my
aunts (not too hard to do) into accompanying me as for some reason they were
quite sure I would step in the wrong place and fall right through the roof
down on into the kitchen... but that attic was worth the heat just to
explore... there was an old photo album filled with tintypes in those pages
that had cutouts just for photos to fit...old photos from 1910 and up too,
when my daddy and his sisters were growing up and Pa looked young and my
grandmother I never knew was smiling mischeviously into some old box camera.
There were school books from Pa's own school days in the 1800's carely
bundled up into a tiny little bundle that held exquisite discoveries like a
blueback speller and a McGuffey reader. There were trunks filled with
clothes from another era...and one very special trunk with something old and
faded that once must have been quite beautiful...a box covered in blue satin
with ribbons and lace...an aunt told me that was a from a box supper...some
girl had made it and my great uncle Jud (who was killed in World War I
before he ever married) had bought it so he could share the supper inside
with her... there were letters in that trunk too although I was never
allowed to read them....found out years later they were love letters between
Jud and his girl, and that my aunts used to sneak up to the attic as young
girls and read them! Once Pa himself took me to the attic and brought out a
wooden box. Five treasures were inside, all things he said he had had as a
boy and each one reserved for one of his five children. I have racked my
brain trying to remember what three of them were, and will have to ask my
aunts...but I remember two of them...one was a pig inside a glass ball...and
one was a blue glass wagon meant to hold salt on the table...I have the blue
glass wagon myself...it was my daddy's legacy. Sometimes the attic held a
few surprises you really did not want to find, like the day I found a shed
snakeskin on the railing...that might have broke me from exploring the
attic, but I don't remember that it did. That attic is long gone and I was
too young when it was cleaned out for the sale when TVA came in to be in on
the cleaning out of it, but I have some remnants...my grandmother's trunk,
and some of those clothes she wore in those faded old prints from 1910, a
tiny button up high top shoe that may have been hers as a child... some of
those long ago photos...but maybe most of all, the memory of the magic found
in an attic layered in generations of living...castoffs from times yet
tenderly laid away for another generation to treasure... wonder these days
of easy purchasing and easy discarding, these days of houses without attics,
these days of yard sales and flea markets, these days of houses new to
everyone...wonder if the generations of living ever wait in layers for the
generations to come...or if we are paying a price we do not even realize,
and those castoffs from our times will never be treasured by the generations
to come?
Just a thought...
jan

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