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Everyone Carries Baggage

While I was in Homer, my mother (once again) pointed out that I still had boxes of crap down in the closet of my room. (That room will always and forever be Valette's Room, even though every other sibling has slept in that room either before or after me. Don't worry, boys; it only means that Mom loves me more than she loves you.)

As I pawed through four boxes of stuff I had carefully and lovingly packed away, probably when I was packing for college, I was surprised at the amount of crap my 18-year-old self couldn't part with.

Most of the stuff held no memory or emotional attachment whatsoever. I wanted to bring those four boxes back through time and ask her, myself, 18-year-old Valette, why the hell I (she) thought one shelf full of stuffed animals needed to be saved.

A fanny pack filled with key chains? A metal chest thing all bent out of shape? A Strawberry Shortcake tin and candle set?

Okay, well, that's just cool.

I managed to condense everything into one small box, the majority of which was filled by my high school and junior high yearbooks as well as a few literary journals that get published to make kids' parents feel proud of Jimmy Junior's spell-checking abilities, one of which has something I wrote that includes the phrase, "Most of my friends would call me something of a feminist."

Yeah. This is why no one wants to remember what life was like at 14.