Afternoon all, All this yarn spinnin got me thinkin about Pa's attic... my oh my the things in that attic...now it is true hadda catch my daddy gone and talk one of my aunts (not too hard to do) into accompanying me as for some reason they were quite sure I would step in the wrong place and fall right through the roof down on into the kitchen... but that attic was worth the heat just to explore... there was an old photo album filled with tintypes in those pages that had cutouts just for photos to fit...old photos from 1910 and up too, when my daddy and his sisters were growing up and Pa looked young and my grandmother I never knew was smiling mischeviously into some old box camera. There were school books from Pa's own school days in the 1800's carely bundled up into a tiny little bundle that held exquisite discoveries like a blueback speller and a McGuffey reader. There were trunks filled with clothes from another era...and one very special trunk with something old and faded that once must have been quite beautiful...a box covered in blue satin with ribbons and lace...an aunt told me that was a from a box supper...some girl had made it and my great uncle Jud (who was killed in World War I before he ever married) had bought it so he could share the supper inside with her... there were letters in that trunk too although I was never allowed to read them....found out years later they were love letters between Jud and his girl, and that my aunts used to sneak up to the attic as young girls and read them! Once Pa himself took me to the attic and brought out a wooden box. Five treasures were inside, all things he said he had had as a boy and each one reserved for one of his five children. I have racked my brain trying to remember what three of them were, and will have to ask my aunts...but I remember two of them...one was a pig inside a glass ball...and one was a blue glass wagon meant to hold salt on the table...I have the blue glass wagon myself...it was my daddy's legacy. Sometimes the attic held a few surprises you really did not want to find, like the day I found a shed snakeskin on the railing...that might have broke me from exploring the attic, but I don't remember that it did. That attic is long gone and I was too young when it was cleaned out for the sale when TVA came in to be in on the cleaning out of it, but I have some remnants...my grandmother's trunk, and some of those clothes she wore in those faded old prints from 1910, a tiny button up high top shoe that may have been hers as a child... some of those long ago photos...but maybe most of all, the memory of the magic found in an attic layered in generations of living...castoffs from times yet tenderly laid away for another generation to treasure... wonder these days of easy purchasing and easy discarding, these days of houses without attics, these days of yard sales and flea markets, these days of houses new to everyone...wonder if the generations of living ever wait in layers for the generations to come...or if we are paying a price we do not even realize, and those castoffs from our times will never be treasured by the generations to come? Just a thought... jan