Treasure Hunt

Good news and bad news:

The good news is that this week, my grandma, my mom, my little sister and I are staying at the beach. The bad news is that we are helping relatives clean out storage rooms. Three to be exact.

All three storage rooms are being paid for by my great-grandmother to house stuff she doesn't have space for. The thing is, my great-grandmother tends to keep things that have absolutely no purpose or value whatsoever. These storage rooms have not been opened since hurricane Charlie hit Florida. They are tiny and have no air-conditioning. Get the picture?

We spent all of today wading through rotten cardboard boxes, plastic cups wrapped in newspaper (weird, right?), clothes from the 70's, and much, much more. I don't mean to make it sound completely miserable though. Every so often we would find something worth keeping or something important. Whenever we happened upon something worth saving, my cousin would say, "We've found some buried treasure!"

None of our "treasures" would be of any value to someone outside the family. But to us, some of the things we found are priceless. We found: a Confederate dollar bill (worthless on eBay or Amazon but cool for us), lots of my great-grandmother's paintings (she is a fantastic artist), and my personal favorite-> old pictures. Lots and lots of old pictures.

I have a deep fascination with family history. I'm the grandchild who will sit and listen to any and every family story ever told. I enjoy looking through photographs of great-great-grandparents. I love rereading letters that were written years before I was born. If my great-grandmother doesn't want them, I'm going to ask to keep some of the photographs. So in my opinion, all this cleaning was worth it.

Who knew that buried among all those 70's clothes and cardboard boxes were so many family memories?