Everyone loves those programs on HGTV where people search their attics and discover all kinds of “treasures” that end up being valuable. Who could forget the success of the PBS series “Antiques Road Show.” What about the show, “The 1000 Mile Yard Sale” on every fall. Well this is not about any of those kind of things. This is the story of our attic in our home in bayside when I was growing up, the “Aunt Bee” home.
I don’t really remember when we discovered the attic as a great place to go but it always was. I can’t ever remember being scared up there; it was not dark and creepy. It was well lit, had a small bedroom on one side and a large storage area on the other. There were a couple of windows and plenty of lights. There were Christmas decorations and old clothing hung on a steel pipe and a small bed in the bedroom. There was a wooden staircase leading up to it. I remember that sometimes we played hide and seek in the house and the attic could be a prime spot.
Then one day, we discovered treasure! Yes, real treasure – jewelry hidden (or so we thought) behind the walls in some rafter space. There was a large box of it. Some were just jewels, some jewelry and all exotic. It was discovered during a game when we were looking for someone up there. There were coats and stuff hung on a pipe across the rafters and behind them was a great spot. It was there that the box was encountered. I can remember dragging it out and opening up the smaller boxes inside and marveling at the “booty” we had discovered.
Some of these jewels were the things we dropped purposely on our neighbor’s lawn after we had discovered what this was, as I talked about in this post. It was an old box of costume jewelry, and the makings for more. To be honest, I do not know why we had it. I don’t remember my mom making or wearing the jewelry. I can remember it being some very gaudy colors – metallic blues and reds and greens and fake gold. There were clip on earrings, necklaces, pendants and broaches. But one thing I do know is that these jewels were the objects of childhood fantasies galore – cops and robbers, pirates, amateur archaeologist, junior scientist, just gobs of them. Now, I don’t remember what happened to them, why we ever stopped playing with them or where they went but the image of some jewels in a cotton-lined box will stick with me forever.
(These are stories about things that actually happened with plenty of witnesses. It has passed from the apocryphal to canonical in nature. Wiki says of canon – “material that is considered to be "genuine", "something that actually happened", or can be directly referenced as material produced by the original author or creator.”)
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