Early on Sunday, May 8, I started digging through my old trunk for a photo to share with my Mom on Mother’s Day. “My old trunk” is a leather suitcase that I “won” at an odd antique auction in 2002. My friends and I were bored and the auction was a free event at Snowbird. It seemed like a good excuse to head to the mountains on a hot day in July. We sat on the grass under the harsh high-altitude sunlight as I became increasingly thirsty and antsy. The auctioneer talked up the suitcase as a unique piece from China in the 1890s. I bid $100. It felt ridiculous the moment I did it.
I have no idea whether the suitcase is authentic; that seems unlikely, actually. A hundred dollars was a full month’s rent for me in 2002; that, too, is its own story. But I spent a lot of money on a stupid thing, so it seemed prudent to use it somehow. I took my trunk home and started stuffing it with things I thought were worth keeping: Old journals, letters, photos, artwork, my collection of Beanie Babies (it was still close enough to the ’90s to believe those might still have worth someday. I had also just spent $100 on a musty brown trunk, so clearly I did not have great insight into investment collectibles.)
The trunk collected dust in my parents’ basement for nearly two decades as I moved through six states and too many small apartments to count. Finally, during one of my last visits to Utah before the extended pandemic isolation, I hauled the unwieldy trunk home.
The trunk has now sat in my house collecting dust for two years. Spring in Boulder has been hot, windy, and tinderbox dry. We’ve already had more wildfire scares in 2022 than in the past six years we’ve lived here combined. While packing a go-bag recently, I considered whether I’d bother rescuing the trunk if I had time.
“It has all of my handwritten journals,” I thought. “But it’s so heavy. Maybe I should transcribe them. But no, that would be tedious and ultimately pointless. It’s not like I have children who would care about these things after I’m gone.”
Then on Sunday, after just five minutes of sorting through the overstuffed trunk, I unearthed a small trove of riches. The find made my morning: A beautiful photo of my mother with me as a 4-month-old baby. A forgotten journal from my early 20s — the rare dry spell in my documented life — when I was traveling across the country in a Geo Prism. A letter that my father wrote to my mother’s parents when our family — then just my Mom, Dad, and 11-month-old me — were packing up to move from Colorado to Texas. I’m not even sure how this letter took up residence in my trunk, but it was such a treasure to discover on Mother’s Day, something I can cherish now that my father is gone:
“I guess I never really told you how much I love your daughter. I feel very lucky to have married someone like her. She is the kindest, sweetest person I’ve ever known and I think that’s a tribute to you for the way you raised her. I think Jill is very lucky to have a Mom like her.”
The discovery sparked a desire to spend more time sifting through the old trunk and discovering the stories within. This is the premise of this newsletter: For each post, I will find an object or journal entry and write a story about it. In this way, I can both create a fireproof archive of the contents, and commit myself to a writing project that I think has some creative potential. There are so many adventures stored within that trunk that are waiting to breathe again.
For the past 16 years, I’ve kept an outdoor adventure blog at jilloutside.com. If you’ve enjoyed my work in the past, I hope you’ll subscribe to my newsletter. More readers are always more incentive to write. Thank you.