So...

A couple of decades ago, my Aunt - who raised me for many years - asked for help getting several large boxes off a high shelf in one of her closets. These boxes had been moved from house to house since my brothers and I moved in with her and my Uncle in the 1970s.

Despite the marriages, divorces, deaths, and births pockmarking the subsequent decades, no one apparently really looked inside the boxes. The boxes simply got moved…put in a different closet…up in the latest garage or attic space. They were shoved on top of a different shelf in this new place or that.

Upon hefting them off my Aunt’s shelf, we discovered the boxes were gorged with old family photos. These were pictures taken/accumulated/hoarded by my parents who died in 1972.

There were a lot.

A.

Lot.

I mean, if photos were dollar bills I could “make it rain” with abandon in a strip club every night of every Super Bowl week of the 80s, probably the 90s, and quite possibly the new millennium.

Physical photographs, for those of you unfamiliar with…ya know…ancient history, are thin. You can cram a gargantuan glut of photographs in boxes.

Being the well-ordered, uncluttered, neat freak that I am, I hauled the boxes home to San Antonio and wedged them into a little used upstairs closet…for 20 years.

Several weeks ago, for reasons that I am now consciously opting to no longer remember like many bad choices in my life, I resolved to wade into the boxes and sort through the avalanche of antiquity.

It was a wonderful and, at times, remorseful journey.

I found a plethora of memories. Long unknown images of my parents, my brothers, my grandparents, and many others.

I also unearthed a deep chasm of questions and what I now realize will forever be a dark valley of an unrequited romance with my family history. There were mounds and multitudes of unknown faces, places, and stories. Mountains of mysteries snowcapped in puzzles with too many missing pieces.

I’ve sorted through all the boxes now, and today I finalized the process of distributing the identifiable photos to applicable family members as best I could.

I stuffed them into new boxes which I shoved into mailboxes.

There’s no real point to this little tale of wistfulness and woe, although perhaps there’s some wisdom.

Don’t stuff away your memories whether they’re physical photos or soon to be forgotten stories. Label them. Share them. Unbox them.