10,000 Leagues Under the House

While at my parents' house a couple weeks ago, I cleared some of my old boxes out of the crawl space. We moved into that house on Halloween 1990, the year I started grade seven and left elementary school and its accoutrements (charm necklaces, fuzzy stickers, Bobbsey Twins) behind. The boxes I was clearing out were time capsules, sealed by my 10-and-10-months-old self in the stage of packing where anything that is not clothes, books, or music and cannot be easily contained in a box and labeled sits in the corners of the room staring at you until you throw it all in random boxes and label them "STUFF". This stage is also known as the Hysteria Stage. In this case, they were labeled "Stuff For Basement". Not surprisingly, never unpacked.

Thankfully, the boxes were light. Some of them were practically empty, or containing stuff that should have gone in the garbage sixteen years ago. At least, they would have if I could have borne it then. It's easier to give your best white plastic purse away to the Sally Ann with the distance and maturity that 27 brings. Ditto, actually, for stuffed animals. Six or eight boxes actually didn't take that much time to divide into recycle, donate, and keepsake.

What took me the longest in this exercise was being my own personal archeologist. Why did I think endless mounds of cotton batten (and layers and layers of toilet paper when the cotton ran out) were necessary to protect small porcelain cats? I knew I was obsessed with Tic-tacs, but why did I pack so many empty boxes of them? Best of all was reading my grade one, two and three journals out loud to my mom, including impertinent answers written underneath the teacher's comments (journal: [something about eating a lot of hotdogs], teacher: "You might get very fat." my postscript: "No.") and one year when my teacher used such boring reward stickers that I made each one into a crazy-looking face.

I had a small obsession with little posable woodland creatures called Sylvanian Families and maintained an elaborate shoebox dwelling for them with many small and inventive homely touches (ideas ripped, no doubt, from the pages of The Borrowers and A Cricket in Times Square). Ladders made of chopsticks and toothpicks, stoves with drawn-on elements, a bath made from an oyster shell, lumpy little vests made of felt. The Sylvanian Families guys obviously had the same obsessions I did, because I found a tiny hand-drawn copy of The Phantom of the Opera on their bookshelf.

I also found a little notebook of paper that proclaimed itself as a book of secrets that only Robyn could read and any trespassers would be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. This book, of course, had nothing written in it after that proclamation.

There were middle school and high school things as well. All my old sheet music. The yearbook I faked signatures in so I would seem less uncool (which of course resulted in feeling even more uncool than before). The computer dating match-up results which recommended me to one moron, five people I didn't know and Jeremy. Projects about Whales! Egypt! Anglo-Saxons! After elementary school I stopped making weird little things so there was less to find.

I had a strange feeling looking at this stuff. It readjusted the idea I have of myself enough that I could catch a glimpse of what I must have been like as a kid without all of my self-aggrandizing or self-deprecating notions getting in the way. I was the funniest girl in grade five! I have a certificate to prove it! Maybe the secret is to try to be true to your 10-year-old self as often as you can afford to be.