Box of Treasures - Photo Heart Connection ~ May

Recently my daughter and I were cleaning and organizing our storage room. You know the storage room, everybody has one. It is that space where all the stuff you don't know what to do with winds up. Ours is also truly a storage space. It holds our daughter's vast American Girl Doll collection and her assorted pieces of Playmobile. Items that we would never get rid of, keeping them instead for her future children.

I had planned on working on this project this past winter, except that the storage room is barely heated. The thought of wearing my down winter coat to tackle the project did not seem appealing.

So on a recent rainy day, that didn't turn out to be so rainy, we made the storage room our project. The process went so much faster with the two of us, and since many of the items are hers it was better for her to decide to keep, donate or pitch instead of me.

As I started on the far back corner of the room, I came across this box.

I knew it contained some items of my Great-Aunt Viola's. After she passed away, it was my dad and his siblings' responsibility to clean out her house and sell it. My aunt had never married and had outlived all her siblings.

All the great nieces and nephews could pick out things that meant something to us. I chose my treasures from her attic, a place I loved to explore whenever I was at her house. The door to her attic was at the end of her living room. You knew the door led to a magical place. The dark wood four panel door was narrower and shorter than a normal door and the ornate metal door knob was half the size of a regular door knob. When you opened the door you were immediately greeted by a flight of steep, narrow wooden stairs. The kind that creaked with each carefully placed foot. As you looked up the stairs you were greeted by a hazy light from two bare lightbulbs, the air swirling with dust motes. Yes, a magical place indeed.

After my Aunt Viola passed, I chose to keep the extraordinary treasures from her attic that I had played with when I was a child. I have the old vintage Walt Disney and Lassie coloring books that I colored in every time I visited. I have an old wooden seal pull toy, and an old electric plug-in view finder with many disks of 1950's vacation destinations.

For the life of me though I could not remember what was in this box. I brought it upstairs to our dining room table and opened it.

I remember the blue and red yoyo. I played with it all the time, although I was never that good at it. I remember playing Bingo with my aunt using these wooden Bingo pieces, but where were the rest of them and where were the Bingo cards? The rest of the contents of the box were a mystery to me. A Flinch card game? I have never even heard of Flinch. A Pinochle deck and lots of dice.

As I looked through these mystery pieces, I was rewarded with a wonderful surprise. Inside the lid of the Pinochle game, in my aunt's hand writing was a tally of sorts, along with some rules for the game.  I have many wonderful memories of my great aunt so to find something with her handwriting on it was very precious to me, and makes a great photo-heart connection.

Joining Kat:

Joining Heather: