Observations Unearthed from a Box of Memories

My 13-year-old daughter had been asking me to get out a box of memorabilia from my high school years.  Mainly she wanted to read the stories I told her I had written as a teenager, though I let her know they were pitiful.  I tended to take favorite parts of books I'd read and combine them into weirdly configured stories that I usually wrote several chapters of, but rarely finished.

On Saturday, I finally braved the storage closet and pulled out the box.  After lifting layer after layer of stuff from the box, I discovered a few things.

• Those overdone hairstyles of the '80's?  Yeah, my yearbooks were full of them.  Let's hope they never come back.

• My parents spent a lot of money on me.  From senior pictures to a class ring to that high school trip to Washington, D.C., they managed to find the funds - making many sacrifices along the way, I'm sure.  Thank you, Mom and Dad.

• My husband wrote some amazing love letters!  Yes, we dated in the years before e-mail, texting, and cell phones, so I'm blessed to have a stack of pages-long letters from our college years.  Makes me wonder if mine will be the last generation to unearth those handwritten treasures.

• There are some tragedies we never forget.  I saved a newspaper from the day the Challenger Space Shuttle exploded; I was a junior in high school.  It was also the occasion for one of my favorite speeches from perhaps my favorite president, Ronald Reagan.

• This poem, jotted down by my dad on a small sheet of paper, but remembered from his own dad, made my girls laugh.

They walked in silence,

The hour was late.

He went on ahead

To open the gate

She wanted to thank him,

But didn't know how;

For he was a farmer -

And she was a cow.

• Your perspective on life in high school and the one you've developed 25 years later are worlds apart.

And, yes, my stories really were as bad as I remembered them!