Before we moved from Illinois to Michigan, the girls and I emptied a very full crawl space measuring 25 ft. square. The most valuable thing in it was a trunk-sized cardboard box I hadn’t looked into since before we got married.
But it was time to downsize, and we needed to be cut-throat about trimming debris from our lives. The box was marked “Memorabilia” and I had no idea what was inside. It was also marked with water stains from a basement flood two houses back, and I wondered if the box was even worth opening.
After peeling off the dried out, curly-edged masking tape, I opened it to find every letter I’d received during high school and college years, each one still in its envelope, the oldest with four cent stamps. In a day without cell phones, texts or Facebook, handwritten correspondence was the only way we kept in touch. The letters were organized by author, nearly 30 different people, each stack secured with a rubber band and ordered by date. Although the rubber bands had rotted and the letters were stuck together, all were readable.
Tucked in the bottom of the box were my journals from the same time period. Although I didn’t have the letters I had written in answer to the ones I’d received, my journals showed what was on my mind.
After finding the letters, I went upstairs and announced to Nate I’d be taking a few days off from packing up the house to take a trip down Memory Lane. I invited him to join me, but he smiled and said, “No thanks.” He knew how goofy I was as a kid and had better things to do than wade through hundreds of old letters.
Every evening after dinner I “descended” and sat among stacks of boxes that were packed and ready for our move. Author by author I went through the massive letter-box, “visiting” each friend and our shared past.
There were cousins, girlfriends, boyfriends, my sister (after she went to college), my brother (after I went to college), my parents (mostly lectures-in-envelopes), and a number of letters from military guys fighting the Viet Nam war. The whole assemblage was a storyline of life in the sixties, from the peaceful beginning of that decade to its tumultuous end.
I’d forgotten most of the details in the letters but certainly remembered the people. After reading what the girls had written, I packaged those bunches up and sent them to each author. Some guffawed, some cried and some went through a crisis after reading their own writings. As for the guy letters, I read each one, then filed them all in the recycling bin.
The most interesting part of my trip down Memory Lane was to note how all of us had changed, what decisions we’d made since the sixties and who was doing what now. Some have compiled many years of marriage, others had suffered through divorce. Some had no children, others had lots. Some now live in foreign lands, others haven’t gone much of anywhere. Some are wealthy, others are struggling. And a handful have already graduated to eternity.
The letter-box had nothing in it from Nate. That’s because once he and I got to writing, his stack grew so well, it needed its own box. I kept that “set” to open after we’d moved. Going down our own private tour of Memory Lane would be, I thought, something the two of us would have time to share, once we moved to Michigan.
But God had a different plan, and we never got to open that box. My guess is that Nate now owns all knowledge of our past, even without the letters to jog his memory. It no longer matters to him like it still does to me. I believe when we get to heaven, we won’t have forgotten a thing. To the contrary, we’ll probably remember everything more precisely.
One of these days I’ll “descend” to our Michigan basement and open that box marked “Letters from Nate” to make that trip down Memory Lane by myself.
But not yet.
“The memory of the righteous will be a blessing.” (Proverbs 10:7)
