It's dusty, not to mention heartwrenching

Speaking of memory lane, I spent a good deal of today at a task I always have mixed feelings about: cleaning my closet.

The closet in my room is actually quite small, and has some queer angles, if you'll pardon the joke. Yet it's astonishing how much of the detritus of my youth is still crammed into it. Or rather, how much of the detritus of my family's collective past is jammed into its dusty expanse - in our house, perennially low on storage space, it's always a temptation for my siblings and I to stow things we can't bring ourselves to part with in the closets and corners of the next room down, and return to our own with the clutter of yesterday safely out of sight and therefore out of mind. So sorting through my brother's stuffed animals, my mother's summer dresses and my father's old shirts, I had a fairly full account of the last twenty years, written in that revealing and moving language, Clutter.

The motivations for preserving some of the momenti I'd stashed away along the line seemed, blessedly, entirely meaningless - what on earth possessed me to keep a cassette walkman from 1989? Or my American history notes from second year? By and large however, the contents of my closetmoved me not with their emotional obsolescence, but with their continuing resonance, their hold on my heart's history.

For instance, the piece of green plastic emblazoned with the image of a smiling frog, cut from my plastic wading pool before it was thrown away when I was nine. Or the photo album filled with my Grade One and Two pictures, taken with my first camera. And the book my mother made to give structure to my father's departure for several months in Cameroon, when I was two. I guess I shouldn't be surprised that the physical reminders of the past ring so clearly. I do have some pretensions towards being an historian in embryo, after all.

Still, that green plastic frog almost made me cry.