Emotional baggage

It's that time of year again. The bit where I pack up my life and move house. I've done it so many years in a row now that it seems like second nature. I'm packing boxes, it must be September. And this time there are so many more boxes to move.

It's funny, though, because there are a couple of boxes that were never unpacked after the last move. They have stayed, intact, in the bottom of my wardrobe. No doubt they will do the same thing in the new place. Although perhaps not the wardrobe, given that it's somewhat smaller than the present model. But somewhere, out of sight, these boxes will sit until my next move.

They are memory boxes. One is filled with my childhood. Toys, dolls, bits of paper. It stays there against the day that somewhere in the future, I will have children of my own and will want to show them what it was like for me to grow up.

I remember being fascinated when my own mother pulled out her last link with childhood, a doll whose eyes no longer opened, whose hair was made of moulded plastic a slightly different shade to the head it was part of. Looking back now, it's a little sad that this was the only link she had kept to her childhood. Her girlhood moved house with her at the end of last year, a small blue suitcase that held nothing from the time after she was married. A few letters from the time when my father was working in a country town; odds and ends that held some value for her.

My own version of this case is in the second box that moves with me, untouched. It's a plastic crate filled with the random bits I have collected in my travels. Tickets to shows, exhibitions, on trains and planes; programs, photos, trinkets. It all means something to me now, evokes some memory of a time, place or person. In a few years, it is sure to mean less and, if I ever open it, I will probably feel the need to get rid of most of it, much like I did with almost all of the reminders of my school years when I finally cleared the bottom of my childhood wardrobe. But for now it stays in one piece, the baggage that I carry forward into the new house.