Precious memories….
We have a little red building on our property. It was built in the early/mid-eighties as a washhouse (for our washer and dryer), as we lived in a trailer at the time and had no room inside for the appliances. Several years later, my folks built a house, and the washhouse (we called it the little house) was thereafter used as a storage house for all the old stuff we never used and didn’t want to move into the new house. Over the years, we’ve relocated it and added more and more to it, made improvements and alterations to the building.
Recently the floor began falling out, so my mother started cleaning out the little house so it could be repaired. As is the custom among most women, she took it upon herself to start cleaning out and straightening up, throwing away whatever was deemed unneeded or torn up by vermin and transferring stuff to keep from pasteboard boxes into lidded plastic bins to protect the items and make them easier to store. However, doing so unearthed some treasures I’d long forgotten or thought lost to time…things I hadn’t seen in twenty plus years, many of which were precious to me.
One of the things found was a plastic apple with a smiley face on it that jingled when rolled and would straighten itself up no matter how hard or which direction it was batted. This was one of my earliest playthings, one that I’d kept around from the time I was a baby at least until the beginning of my memory. A very simple device, but one I was very glad to see once again.
There were dozens of old books that my folks read to me and helped me learn to read…many were those little Golden Books that most kids are probably familiar with. But also among these were songbooks that came with small records in the backs…you may remember these, as the records were the same size as the books. They don’t make these anymore…I assume they put CDs in the back these days. Many books that I still remember the tunes to…Ugly Duckling Goes to Town, Froggy Went A’Courtin’, and many others that presently escape my mind. Now that I know where they are and can lay hands on them, I’m probably going to get them sometime in the near future and see if they still work and maybe keep a copy on MP3. Maybe my kids can read and sing along to them as I did in my own childhood.
Something that came as a surprise that I’d thought lost forever were the old He-Man mini-comics…you know, the ones that came with the Masters of the Universe action figures and playsets. I’ve only ever seen the covers to these things online, so I’m considering scanning them in full and posting them on the web for all to see. I’m surprised no one’s done this yet…to my knowledge, they’re not available anywhere. I’ll look again to see before I bother scanning them. Another thing I found that I thought were gone…the instruction manuals for my first Transformers, received Christmas 1985, the last year we had Christmas in the old trailer. A minor thing, to be sure, but they were things I thought gone.
In any case, I’m happy to have found these baubles…mementos of the past. I still have sinus trouble from all the dust and rats nests we disturbed going through all that stuff, but it was worth it.
