Boxes.

Yesterday I hosted my last Brown Bag at San Diego Writers, Ink. My first prompt was “Boxes” and here’s what I wrote:

I’ve left my parents’ house over five times and each time boxes stayed behind. Inside, my 8^th grade yearbook where the boy I thought I had a crush on wrote a message in thick sharpie on the front cover which, at the time, I thought meant he liked me and now I see that he liked himself. The medical information book my grandmother gave me for one of my teen birthdays that I used to look up photos of rashes and walk my symptoms through bubbled-diagnostic charts. Boxes of accumulated T-shirts, Splash Mountain pictures at Disneyland, letters from high school pen pal, old purple and flowered journals, awards from the library for summer reading programs. Boxes of Christmas ornaments, smashed bows and stained tree skirts.

And this time, when I move, whoever lives in the house won’t keep my boxes. They have to go with me to Maine or to the dump. I’ve pushed past some of my sentimentality (paying $356/foot of truck space encourages sparse, nomadic tendencies), but I don’t know what my son will want of my childhood.

Behind my license in my wallet, I carried around a tiny headshot of my mother at age 12 with barely red hair and a sailor suit, freckles like pollen on her pink face. I read and reread her middle-school journals and held onto her embroidered hippie jackets.

As a boy, will my son be as fascinated with his mother’s boxes? Will he want to see the menu I created for “Wolfgang Huck’s” as part of my Junior year English class project on Huck Finn. Will the unbound scrapbook I made from my first two years of college and the album from my third in Florence be interesting to my boy who’s currently infatuated with bugs, lizards and trucks?

I’m tempted to call my brother and ask what he liked to know about Mom. My husband, a sensitive father and mild-hoarder like me, says of course Henry will want all these trinkets of Mama. And of course he’ll study them and pick some to display in his room. The boxes I need to leave behind hang on me more than those I need to pack.