My house has turned into a drying station for wet, forgotten items of my youth
Since the flooding debacle in the garage on Saturday (see Part I), I haven't had much time to work with the wet items. Mostly, Jake and I have been pouring boiling water on ice, chopping ice, sweeping the water out of the garage, emptying buckets, and using the neighbor's super-long hose to spray out as much ice as we could from the gutters. Attaching the hose to the water heater was a great idea - and I'm so very happy we were lucky enough to have our neighbors there when they were.
But since I have more time to survey the damage, I've been laying out wet items and putting papers in front of fans. My entire upstairs is being used as drying space.
Yes, you are seeing correctly - the papers run from the deck doors into the kitchen. It was hard to walk around them after putting them down. But thankfully, they only took a couple hours to dry. The yearbooks are taking much longer. But I'm not as worried as I was when I first saw the wet books. I felt certain they were going to be ruined, but thankfully, they aren't - not completely. Sure, I cannot read some of the signatures anymore, but I can still see the pictures, and that's enough; I don't have to buy a new book just because the pages are rippled now.
And in the process of drying things out, I realized that I hadn't looked at these in a really long time. Probably since I packed them in the first place. Which I'm pretty sure was before college. Maybe after. Either way, I can't believe how many papers I kept. Notes passed between classes, letters to and from my mom and brother, and other random pages that I haven't looked through enough to categorize.
There are a lot of memories in these pages, and with a few items - things I hadn't realized I'd forgotten about. A laminated signature poster from my speech class with a note from Katie, drawings of Winnebagos from Abby, notes from Amber and a few even from myself that I never sent to their intended audiences.
(Note from Katie)
(1/3 of Abby's autograph pages in my junior yearbook)
All of these items hold only sentimental value, but only enough in that I have to remember it. It's been 16 years since I graduated high school, and I honestly hadn't though much about it since. The friendships and the experiences left memories, but the things themselves didn't.
I suppose what I've learned through this entire process is that no matter what I lose, I haven't lost everything. I love seeing the old conversations that I had with friends regarding a concert or our minimum-wage jobs or about how we were finding ourselves - but I really am happier knowing that in the end, the day-to-day drama only made us more of who we are today, and the little things, the detailed process of how we got there, doesn't matter as much.
That being said, I'm very thankful these items were salvageable I like to have some physical representation of my friendships from school. I hope that one day I can show my kids and say, "Don't think that you're weird. We were ALL nuts in high school."
I don't see my high school friends now as much as I'd like. We've all moved on in our lives and careers. But I know that within those people who I knew long ago still lives the teenager inside who had doubts and fears, but overcame them. And not because she had notes or books to remember her friends, but because she lived those experiences and became a better person because of it.
Note:
If you'd like to see more images from my crazy during-and-post-flood experience, they are here:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/danny279/sets/72157632980722779/with/8553745374/
No comments:
Post a Comment