Cardboard Boxes

Cardboard boxes contain my past. Searching for a misplaced will which ensures my possible future as a natural gas heiress.This has somehow been misplaced.

Instead I find brochures about how to care for your newborn infant from the 1960's, old birthday cards from various relatives and friends, some handmade, dried up acrylic paint in tubes, half-drawn sketches of nature scenes, a book of modeling nudes, family photos from the 1970's, an old roll of toilet paper stained with something, Victorian cut-outs from an old calendar, my grandmother's handwriting on notes written more than forty years ago, teacups and saucers (matching sets, but dozens of different patterns), a soup tureen shaped like a duck, with a mini-duck tureen son or daughter, framed photos from the 1940's, old report cards, catalog order forms, secret thoughts of my mother written in a green spiral notebook, and countless other objects and memorabilia, moments in time, pieces of a life, pieces of a family. Small nuances that make up a greater, elusive whole.

One photographs contains four people I once knew, all of whom are dead now. But the photo still exists, in a cardboard box in my garage.