The treasure in the attic has been found!

I mentioned on Monday that my plan to get my children to empty the attic of 45+ years of accumulated stuff in search of some fabulous treasure that might have been inadvertently stored up there was not panning out. I guess I should take pleasure in knowing that my kids are smarter than their old man.

So Barb said Enough! and she crawled up there during our unusually cool mornings last week and dropped handed more than 2 dozen boxes full of stuff down on to me. With the garage floor covered in boxes, we then began the process of sorting through them, trying to determine what was of value and what might be disposed of. Let me just say that after going through a few dusty, crumbling boxes, our standards of what might be valuable dropped to an amazingly low level and we now have an empty attic and a garage full of bulging trash bags!

Goodwill will get a couple of boxes of useable items, and there were some things possibly of value to a teacher of little people, and enough dinosaur material to make up an entire year's curriculum. Barb insists that we did NOT recover any actual dinosaur artifacts, but I'm not so sure.

A number of boxes had old Christmas paraphernalia and Easter baskets and stuffed animals and such. Each item evoked a memory or two, and there were even a couple of misty-eyed moments, but thankfully, these were in the latter boxes and all our nostalgic moments were just about spent, so none of it escaped the trash!

And then there were the boxes of letters and keepsakes and old yearbooks and such. These we have set aside to cull through more carefully. Almost all of it will go into the recycling bin, but it is interesting to look at and comment on. Like pictures of old girl friends. "Why, no, honey - I don't even remember her name."

The big treasure? Okay, I admit that we did not find a long-lost Picasso original, or the violin from the Titanic. But we do treasure an empty attic, and I have a ton of blog material that you will soon see in a new series entitled "Stories from the Attic."