Boxes

It had been at least 24 years since her grandmother had passed, and though her mother’s passing left a fresh cut to her soul, it seemed the one left by her grandmother was still more raw, less healed and less likely to heal, even with time.

Upon her mother’s passing, several things came into Catherine’s possession, most were her mother’s prized possessions, not meaningful things, simply material things. Her mother was, after all, as much a material girl as Madonna herself.

One item out of the lot was not her mother’s per say. It had actually come into her mother’s possession wrongfully when her grandmother passed. Even though she knew it rightfully to be Catherine’s, still she kept it all these years. It was a cedar chest.

She could see that her mother had tried tirelessly to open the chest. Though it didn’t look like she’d met with much success, leaving Catherine with doubt that she herself could open it. Still she brought it home and set it at the end of her bed, and she put one of the quilts she had in the closet gently over it, as if tucking it in for the night. She then went to sleep herself.

One would have thought she would also be tirelessly looking for ways to unlock the chest, but months passed and she didn’t. She was simply comforted by having the piece of her grandmother near. She’d cleaned and oiled the exterior wood and she’d changed the quilts that covered it and sometimes she’d sit in the floor and lean against it to read or write a letter. Mostly though, it was just there.

One day, maybe six months after she brought it home, she was wiping it lovingly down once again with furniture oil and a soft cloth. She hit a pressure point she hadn’t noticed before and a tiny drawer popped out at the bottom of the chest. Inside the drawer were 2 things, a small, black, leather bound journal, filled cover to cover with her grandmothers handwriting. And a tiny golden key.

She opened the journal first. The first page described a memory. Something her grandmother wrote and described as a ‘hundred dollar memory’ which slightly amused Catherine, but also made her want to read more.

This memory was from her infancy. It described her as an infant, her laughter, the fact that she looked in her eyes like she was up to no good, even though she was only a baby. Not sure what made it a hundred dollar memory, but it was still fun to read her grandmothers words about her.

The whole book was filled with hundred dollar memories. She sat against the old chest and read, and laughed and cried until she finished every last memory.

When she opened the chest, she could see inside evidence of all the memories. Earrings she’d bought at a yard sale for her grandmother when she was 5, photos from weekend trips to caves and historic sites. Each had one thing in common...each had a tiny envelope attached, the kind you buy in a stationery store. On each envelope was a date, and each date correlated with a memory in her grandmothers book. Each had a hundred dollar bill folded neatly inside it.

In all, there were 200 memories locked away in this precious box, 200 hundred dollar bills and tucked away at the bottom was a larger envelope, with a pen, a fresh clean journal and a note instructing Catherine to go out and make her own hundred dollar memoriesi with someone she loved.

She closed the chest, keeping only the 20k in hundreds out along with the new journal and she pondered who she might share her hundred dollar memories with.