www.thefairypaintbox.com

  Most high school graduates clean out their childhood room before leaving home for college.  I certainly did, however I had a coveted basement room (with a window providing egress to the outside) and sibblings lined up to take it.  College is the giant step that delivers us to adult hood.  A four year span during which we dabble at being grown up but are not yet burdened with grown up responsibilities, nor do we spend much time considering them.

  My oldest daughter however, cleaned out her room after returning from her first year of college. Perhaps it was born of the desire not to give up who she was before she knew who it was she was going to be.

  Most of her throw -aways were meaningless; high school notebooks with doodles, bits of ribbon, old markers and chewed pencils from projects long completed.  But here and there among the trash were poignant memories of the child she had been: a plastic horse (her favorite that had survived earlier room clean outs) little girl necklaces and a happy face pin in a jewelry box destined for Goodwill, the odd rock or feather collected on a long ago walk in the fall.

  And of course when one is in the throes of emerging independence, soloing away from the nest for the first time, one can be ruthless when discarding childhood.  I was.  Over time the the physical mementos of my childhood have vanished.  The collection of china horses that I loved, awards that I won, books that I read a hundred times or more are gone.  I have no recollection  of when the boxes that contained them  became too many or the changes in my life made them too heavy to move. Or maybe,  like my daughter I didn't realize that  I would want to look at their contents again one day.  A day when my future no longer stretched out  endlessly before me like a lovely uncut birthday cake;  that magic time when when anything is possible.

   I had more in the way of material possessions than my mother ever did.  She grew up on a farm on the northern plains during the depression.  She slept in  a room in which water froze in a pitcher on her night stand  and lived in a house with no indoor plumbing.  It is odd to consider that I have more of her meagre childhood belongings than  I do of my own.

  Could it be that my daughter's possessions evoke more memories in me than they do in her?  She can't remember the day she received the floppy stuffed duck.  But I do and I remember the little girl who took it with her every where she went for months. She has little memory of her  beloved Little Red Riding Hood rag doll that she dropped down the heating duct and cried as "Doll" disappered from view into the bowels of the house.  (As her grandfather tried to figure out how to dismantle the duct work, her father rigged his fishing pole and a rescue was effected.)

  So perhaps it won't make a difference to her whether or not she keeps the piggy bank collection; each piggy a gift carefully selected for her by someone she loves.  But one day, I think it will.

  Maybe at this moment the softball trophies, photos, and team pins acquired in travels around the country as we pursued a sport at which she  not only had incredible talent but a passion that burned deeply within for ten summers of her life, don't mean a lot.   I can't help but think that one day the state championship trophy, the fifth and third place medals awarded at national tournaments may bring back recollections of a time that was as special and unique as were the families and friends we were privileged to know and with whom she played for all those summers.

  So I pick these relics out of the trash, pack them away in plastic totes and wonder how it can be that our children, the beings  with whom we are most initmately connected pass through our lives so quickly on the way to their own. I remember holding this oldest daughter of mine the week she was born and thinking we had all the time in the world.  But then I guess that is the goal, the plan, after all.  A good parent's job is to raise capable independent adults. I just didn't think they would be adults so soon.

  One day my daughter will want to open the boxes of her life, to show her own daughter or even remind herself who she was when she was a girl.  If she is anything like me, she will discover that who she used to be is not so different than who she is.