Once, and it may have even been as long ago as my 40th birthday, my mom gave me a ring that had belonged to my grandma. My first reaction to the ring was to hate it. It was big and loud. I kept it on my desk in the kitchen in a ring box that had belonged to something else once. I recall showing the ring to Pal, so I'm thinking that was during a Thanksgiving dinner, and Pal told me it was a great ring and that I should wear it. I didn't wear it right away, but I did search for it not long after that and I couldn't find it. I had no recollection of moving the ring from where it had sat so long on my desk. I searched the area around my desk, inside and underneath any drawers the ring could have fallen into, I searched the cabinets, I searched any place I had ever stashed anything of value to see if the ring was there. I asked the house cleaner and his house cleaning partner wife if they had seen the ring. I even considered wether or not a repair man who had been in the house could have possibly pocketed grandma's ring. I was beside myself and just sick over the ring for maybe 5 years. Every so often I'd re-search of all the places I had searched before, to no avail. When the movers came to pack up the house I told them the story of the missing ring and declared that not only would the person who found my ring get my undying gratitude until the day I die, he would also get a cash reward. I had my fingers crossed.
When the movers went into the attic (have I ever mentioned my dislike of attics and basements? They creep me out. I think it is because I grew up in an apartment) they called me up and strong armed me into going through the clutter and disaster that was my attic as they packed it so that I wouldn't have to go through the mess once I got to new town. No matter how many times I told them I would be okay with going through the packed up mess in new town they kept coercing me to stay in the attic and continue to plow through the boxes, bags, and containers of disaster that I did not stash up there. It soon became clear to me that my house cleaner of 10 years had been cleaning off surfaces by boxing up our stuff and storing it in the attic. All these stupid little things that I had wondered where in the world they had gone to had been in the attic all along. Eventually I was down to tattered paper grocery bags, and I began to sort through those. To be honest, much of it was the hundreds of pounds of school notices that come home over the years, but then there was one torn handle-less dust covered bag left to dissect. I reached into the bag and started pulling out stuff that once been on my kitchen desk, picture frames, note pads, still packaged pens, and then I spotted a jewelry box. Was this the box? I couldn't remember the box that I had put grandma's ring into. I lifted the box, there was something in it, I heard a strange sound come from my throat, I opened the box, and there it was. Grandma's ring. Safe and sound. I screamed, I cried, I looked to the heavens and I blubbered something to grandma and then I wore that ring for three days straight.
When we lived in Brooklyn we had a little storage space in the basement of our apartment building. It soon became obvious that it was stupid place to store things because we knew the building had water problems. But we never dragged that basement stuff into the apartment. When we prepared to move to stepford I discovered that much of my college photo work, which had been in the basement, had been tainted with black mold and I had to toss it. I was heart broken. My old work was meaningful to me. It represented a time when I was someone else. I wasn't a mother back then I was an artist, I was a photographer. I still longed for that photographer part of me, which I had long since buried.
Every few years my eye would fall on the two small boxes of photo work, mostly contact sheets of paying jobs and not my creative stuff that I did have l lying around and I'd take a glance at them. I was always sad to see how little of what I had done in college had survived and I always thought there must have been more that made it through.
Besides the attic the other area of the house that was pure disaster was the garage. We had never in the 14 years we lived in stepford even attempted to park our vehicles in the garage. The @#$%&* house cleaner was also tossing stuff into the garage. I found door mats I thought I had forgotten to bring home from the store, bags of recyclables, brand new water bottles, hilariously outdated baby carriers, clothes, never realized art projects, and then there was a box that said "photo stuff from hall closet". I peeked in the box and indeed it was my photo stuff! I put the box into my truck and when I made it back to utopia I held my breath and started to go through the box. At first I was disappointed because what I thought were going to be photos turned out to be empty mats, but then I lifted out a couple of binders and a folder or two and I wept as I realized that even though my original photos weren't in that box just about very negative I produced in that time was. Guess who is going to treat herself to a new scanner when she sets up her work area in new town!