The Trunk.
An unwanted heirloom deposited in my care, passed along by so many folk who didn't know quite what to do with it.
This trunk belongs to distant family. By rights it ought to be in someone else’s attic, growing dusty, but with the recent popularity of decluttering it has found itself without a home. It has been passed along, with moderate interest, between family members until it reached my door, quite detached from the care of immediate family but with the merest thread of connection still remaining.
It sat in my hall for some days before I found a quiet moment to explore it’s contents. I was expecting stacks of greying old linens and possibly the odd document but what I discovered was that the trunk and it’s contents proved to be a charming historical document of generations of family through wartime and domestic life.
Each item was briefly labelled, just sufficient in summary to give it meaning. The collection, with it’s selection of what was deemed precious, conveyed to me down the years the importance of physical items to tell our small tales with a tangible delight that our current digital archives will sadly lack. It was also a good reminder to make those little notes on the back of photos (or alongside trinkets) of who and where and when as without these they will only tell a fragment of the tale.
