Scheherazade – VII — Forgotten Green Soldiers

A day in the attic blue tarps: petrified candy, Wacky Packages, teacher comments that still smart, an Advent calendar, and the sad, erotic flight of a Firebird.

Morning

To get to the photos and letters I have to pull back the blue tarp and mine my claim, opening boxes, unstacking them, restacking them, picking through their contents, and sliding everything back and forth to make room for the next box. I fill up the available floor space around me so that I find myself literally boxed into corners, and I hop and I stumble about trying to find my footing when I need to get downstairs for food or a long-delayed bathroom break.

I started out in this pile with the smug, just-give-me-that confidence of somebody attacking a Rubik’s cube for the first time – a clear breadcrumb vision to restoring everything as I found it – but four or five hours pass, and I’ve got piles everywhere and no real idea where anything started out or which things are married to which boxes. But I’ve surrendered to the chaos, and now it’s a regular Christmas morning up here.

Sadly, there’s no one to share my nostalgic discoveries with, but I let out enough internal mental leas…