Strings too short to save

I did it!!  A year of blogging.  Quite a feat for a short-attention-span type of gal.  At least the memories created here take up less room than those in the attic.

There’s a heater tucked in the corner.  Coco brought it home years ago.  “I’m on a scavenger hunt,” she’d told the man answering a knock at the door.  “All I need to win is a roll of toilet paper and a flavored toothpick.”  This was not her first pseudo-scavenger mission.  Generally the homeowner short on flavored toothpicks would hand her a roll of Charmin or Northern.  That’s how she economically TP’d friends’ homes back in her heyday.  That night she’d been less successful, and received a cast iron heater instead.  For years it sat nestled in the corner of the teenager’s room.  Once she left for college, it was too heavy for me too move far.  I waddled the clawfoot antique back and forth on its legs to its present location in the attic.  I’ll sell it with the house unless an earthquake makes it a downstairs dining room fixture.

In the opposite corner of the attic are Christmas ornaments, a hand-painted reindeer on a stick from a special friend, and a carefully crinkly-wrapped gingerbread house that was built about the same time Hansel and Gretel did their walk-though.  There are gingerbread men made from dark cork panels edged in red rickrack, dancing ballerinas (a few less tiaras than ballerinas), globby bread dough ornaments in ugly colors, all fabricated by little chubby hands so many years ago.

Cheezy’s old trading cards, the whole three boxes probably now worth $10, sit at the bottom of another corner.  Atop those boxes are familiar story books read at bedtime and a box of worn baby clothes — sweaters and hats with pre-fab ringlets crocheted by Great Grandma Lang, the first romper I sewed for Hot Wheelz, a pink gingham dress sewn by my mom with matching bloomers to cover the GAP’s rubber pants, and the only knitted item I ever attempted (on a hand loom) for my firstborn.

Boxes of trophies for soccer, spelling bees, baseball, fill another box.  The Mandy doll clothes I sewed for my daughters are stored near the outfits my mom fashioned for my 21” bride doll.

Coco is my collector.  Long before her degree in Horticulture, she was into cockroaches.  Stuffed, that is.  A red plastic mallet for hitting the roach over the head until it stopped moving came with the toy.  A shoebox is the final resting place for her Kinder toys — the contents of many chocolate eggs bought during a trip to Canada.  Her many abandoned hobbies have left residue in an array of different sized boxes — popsicle sticks and thumb depressor houses, stained glass slivers, drapes of cut paper flowers, and pastels and charcoals.  I thought I saw a box labeled, “Strings to short to save.”

You’ve heard of FILO and LIFO, but my attic is KINRO (Kids in, never really out).

Related posts:

1. Long ago in the land of milk and cookies
2. Let me introduce you to my family
3. List for the doctor
4. New car trauma
5. December already?