I found my Family in the Attic…What were they doing up there?

     Two nights ago, around 10 o’clock or so, I got the overwhelming urge to clean something.  I ended up in my attic, re-packing and re-organizing the things I’ll take back to college with me at the end of next month.  When I’d finished doing this, I began to pick up all the books lying around the attic floor (my mother has a really annoying habit of just throwing them up the attic stairs when she’s finished reading them, and not taking care of them, and so books are literally everywhere up there), and pushing boxes around, which is how I ended up discovering all sorts of neat things.  I found my family in my attic, which was not something I’d expected to happen when I’d gone upstairs to clean nearly two hours earlier.

I found photo albums, with black and whites of my grandparents and great-grandparents.  I found my mother’s wedding dress.  I found my parents’ wedding album, with a receipt for the wedding rings my dad bought and paper plates and napkins saved from the wedding reception.  I found the program from my grandfather’s high school graduation ceremony in 1947, with the Senior Class’ will and prophecy inside of it…  And, what I can’t figure out is, why was all this stuff just sitting around in my attic???

I suppose that different people value different things.  For my mother, it’s understandable that she wouldn’t want to keep her wedding album sitting around the house; it’s probably not a very nice reminder of the way things were.  I don’t understand why the photo albums were up there, though.  No one can look through them if they’re holed up in the attic, lost amid the piles of junk up there.

There are some people who keep scads of photographs around their house.  Their walls, refridgerators, shelves and book cases are covered with pictures of family and friends.  My house isn’t like that.  My mom keeps a few pictures of my sisters and I out, and one of my grandmother, but that’s about it. There are no photos of my aunts, and none of my cousins.   I’m wondering if this lack of photos, and the fact that I discovered so much of my family’s things in the attic, says about my mother’s view of blood relations…

Oh, and for the record, the shelves in my bedroom are covered with photos.  My book case is filled with photo albums.  The black and whites of my grandparents and great-grandparents have been added to my collection.