I am the keeper of the boxes. 

I embrace being the family historian, but I am overwhelmed by it at the same time. It’s a roll I came to naturally. I spent my childhood digging alongside my father, an amateur archaeologist who was intrigued by most things historical. I was also the kid who would drag out the slide projector after dinner and make the family look at old pictures. I loved the old photo’s (little did I know how many there were!) that showed my parents young and attractive and in places I had never been. I had no idea how far back these pictures went, but I had enough interest in genealogy to get an A on my 11th-grade family history paper. (Prove it you say? That paper also turned up in the boxes, dot-matrix printing, xeroxed pictures and all.)

But I am getting ahead of myself. The boxes, they are key to the story. Some of the boxes were packed by me as I sorted my mother’s house after her death in 2014. Others were waiting for me in the attic, the familiar Gentle Giant boxes from my parent’s move in 1998. Yet others, though, had laid dormant for far longer.

My grandfather, Sidney Sanderson, passed away in 1987, after living in the same house in Highland Park, NJ since his marriage in 1936. I was in college when he died. I was just finishing my first semester and my mother hadn’t wanted to upset me with his sudden illness, so I barely knew he was sick before he was dead. With the true self-centeredness of a 17-year-old, I didn’t have a lot to do with what came next.

There was the funeral at his Episcopal church in Highland Park – again, the proof is in the boxes: one white guest book signed by me and about a dozen or two other people – but I really can’t tell you anything about the day. Nor do I remember anything about my mother mourning, and yet she must have been heartbroken. Mom was an only child born to older parents who were charmed by their little girl, having been written off as an old maid and a confirmed bachelor by many. My grandmother, Elsie, died of cancer when my mother was in her mid-30’s, but Mom maintained the close relationship with her father which had begun at a very early age. The bond was both loving and cerebral. Photo’s of the young family show a smitten father, and letters reveal an early and lasting interest in my mother’s intellectual and academic development. 

But again, I am skipping ahead to the content of the boxes.

In 1987 my mother dismantled her family home without much help from me. I remember one day, probably around the funeral, going through drawers and trying on long kid gloves and trying to convince my mother to save everything. That would have been a lot.

My grandfather’s house was a time capsule. Nothing that could be used again was thrown away. Which is not to say he was a hoarder. (Except with rubber bands…had he lived much longer you would not have been able to open the back door for all the bands on the knob.) Rather, he was frugal. It was thanks to that frugality that I was attending my College on the Hill when he died. But it was also why his little color television sat on top of the ancient black and white behemoth. Why get a TV table when you have a perfectly good surface available? Not to mention, discarding the original TV would have meant paying someone to haul it away. It was also why he spent the last 13 years of his life going to the laundromat. When his washing machine died not long after his wife, my grandfather declared that he would never get his money’s worth from a new washer and thus declined to replace the old one. The local laundromat thanks him for that decision.

So my mother faced a home filled with nearly 50 years of possessions and memories. Her best friend of more than 50 years came out to help her, which must have been a comfort. But as a single, city-dwelling woman with no children, she may have pushed Mom to purge more than a family member might have. I did hear Mom express regret about a few things that were gone, but the story she told most often focused on congratulating herself on pulling back the “antique” saki bottle just before the sale when the ladies running the estate sale seemed just a little too interested in it. Someday I’ll take it to Antiques Roadshow and see if she was right.

I can’t really mourn what didn’t make the trip from New Jersey to Massachusetts since I don’t know what is missing, but I was happy to discover boxes that had clearly come from my grandparent’s house. I peeked in a few boxes as I cleaned out the attic at my parent’s house, but mostly I believed the labels and had Gentle Giant (of course) bring them to my house, where they started a new life as a pile of boxes. And the cycle of moving boxes from one attic to another might have continued if we had an attic. But our jumbled up little farmhouse doesn’t have any storage – no attic and only a damp basement. There is a big room over the garage – which we call our barn because it is away from the house and has never had a car in it. (Actually, it does have a car in it, it’s just that that car has never left the garage and won’t until the elusive day it is turned into a hot rod.) Many boxes did go upstairs in the barn, but so has a lot of other stuff over the years. So much, in fact, that nothing is accessible, except to the mice who have taken up residency. So, between the mice and the existing teetering piles, the boxes I had relabeled “family memories” all came to live in the downstairs bedrooms. They lived in fairly neat piles which were rearranged according to which children were going to be home. And that was fine while I dealt with the more pressing issues of settling an estate and adjusting to living without any parents. But eventually, a new feeling crept into me: the desire to live without “cardboard brown” being a major decorative theme.

Which finally brings me (almost) to the letters. When I started unpacking some of the boxes, it was the photographs which intrigued me the most. Not only were there many – some old friends and lots I had never seen before – but there were the cameras as well. From the Campbell side of the family, I had prints, slides, cameras, and even amazing glass negatives that stretched back to the early 1900s. With that discovery, I immersed myself in my Campbell lineage. I had only just met a whole part of that side of the family the summer after my mother’s death. It was an entire clan that had gathered every summer for 90 years. The story of the weekend we drove for 24 hours to meet the Murphy clan in Appalachian Ohio is for another day, but it is certainly one of the treasures I discovered during that rough first year.

I am still sorting photographs and slides. It is a project I savor, and therefore I make very slow progress. But that work can really only be undertaken in its designated area. (I have realized the risk in letting that project escape the front room.) But letters (yes, we’re really to the letters!), tucked into shoe boxes and tied with ribbon, are almost as portable as the day they were written. And I soon discovered the joy of ending the day tucked in bed with a batch of old letters. I dipped into various series, picking up threads of conversations here and there. It didn’t really matter if I didn’t get all the references or totally understand the context, I knew the characters very well…

A token of love comes in a box because love itself cannot be contained. 
— Binnie Kirshenbaum