The Trunk in the Attic

Unpack Stories from a Forgotten Trunk

I don't have an attic, but I do have a cedar chest I inherited from my mother. After she passed away, I went through the memories stored there. I found some tiny booties, a wedding dress, clippings of stories I wrote for the school newspaper, letters from my Dad when he was stationed with the occupation forces in Japan after WWII, pictures of my grandparents, scrapbooks, and baby clothes. Here lay 83 years of life stacked in a four-foot-long wooden box.

We pack away our memories and let years go by without even looking at them, but those bits and pieces of life trapped in the things we cannot throw away tell a story. They tell many stories.

Here's an exercise. Your mother (or grandmother, aunt, best friend, or those of a character in your story) has passed away. You are cleaning out the attic. You come across a trunk. You open the trunk. What do you find? Write about it. What story does it tell? How might what you find in it change your life? What secrets does it reveal?

For variety, it can be a garage or a storage closet or maybe a four-foot-long cedar chest.

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