Random

There's a big orange storage container in my closet that holds almost all of the things I've saved over the course of my life. In Windsor they were separated into several plastic underbed containers, and innumerable shoeboxes. I started out with the shoeboxes, probably in eighth grade or so, although only years later did I realize that labeling them would be useful. Some boxes are miscellaneous; some contain everything from a particular year, like senior year of high school. There is a box for the Europe trip sophomore year, one for the HILL trip, and another for Florence. The same storage container has awards from high school, my dad's childhood baseball glove, and a long piece of faded Chinese silk, preserved now in a plastic bag, that was once my prized possession.

I like to imagine someone going through that box years from now and trying to get an idea of who I was, like an archaeologist trying to form the image of a people through a shard of the cup that once held their wine. The first thing you see when you open the box is a small paper plate wrapped in tissue paper; on it there's a handprint in clay. What would someone make of that, supposing that it survived? What are the chances that they would be able to guess that that was my mother's hand, even if they had everything else in that box to help them?