I have always been a believer that material thing’s don’t mean as much as the memories you hold in your mind. Yet there are point’s in life, were a object in your hand can bring emotion, a memory, a time passed brought to the here and now. Those item’s hold a story, your story. A story that once you are gone, where does it go?
I mention this as just a few short day’s ago, I began clearing my possessions, pausing with each item as I pulled them from the boxes, Until a old tarnished silver box was in my hands.
Holding it, opening it, seeing what lay inside, a smile of a memory, a item that in a way links my oldest to my youngest with nothing other then a shared thought. The box I had owned for years, the item inside 19yrs old, looked after for so long.
My husband looks at me, asks what it is, I look at him confused, knowing I have told him many a time. My mind blanks and the box and the contents end up in the rubbish bag, my heart sinking, as tears threatened too fall.
My husband asks me why did I do that, esp if it was a memory dear to me. A memory I reply, what use is a memory with a material item, when the material item will mean nothing to those after me, it will just be a tarnished silver box holding something that means nothing to them. He say’s that the story can be passed on, I got cross, simply replied *How can the memory be passed on when even my husband doesn’t remember the story despite it being told many a time, it’s right now a meaningless trinket*
Looking at the rubbish bag, seeing the box, a part of me wanted to pull it back out, yet the other half told me to leave it, Dried roses gifted to me upon my first child’s birth, roses are a flower that my youngest child adores and loves. A link yet nothing.
It was then I snapped, as I started throwing out trinkets, trinkets of memories that I will only ever know, I tore up photographs, I threw away old negatives, 4 boxes of my past whittled down to just half of one box.
Passing thing’s onto my daughter, whislt informing my husband what is to go to the others.
It’s time to let go of the past, the tomorrow I do not know, the now, I wish for little trace of my existence of the path I once walked.
Memories of the mind are the most important, material items, hold no value bar to those that hold them.
Later that same day, I had managed to leave the home and head to sainsbury’s. A gentlemen walked past me, he nodded a slight smile, no words spoken, I nodded back, and kept going.
A gentlemen I knew from my past, who I have never seen in my home town before, a gentlemen of the spiritualist church, the church whom gave me the roses.
It was at that moment I knew I had done the right thing.
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