Father’s Day, and we are all filled with barbecue: ribs, chicken, smoked brisket.  Baked beans, coleslaw, corn muffins, corn on the cob.  Blueberry crisp and ice cream for dessert. 

PC and his dad are on the deck, sharing cigars and old stories.  My friend M and her daughter left a while ago, and we had a great dinner, conversation hopping back and forth as though all of us had dined together a hundred times, even thought M had only just met PC for the first time, and his father as well. 

The girls played in Rabbit’s basement playroom and posed for pictures after dinner, sticking out their tongues. 

After M left, I dug into the large cedar chest PC’s dad had brought up from Oklahoma, filled with old baby books, a pair of impossibly tiny kid gloves, silver baby mugs, a delicate muslin apron, hand stitched quilt, yellowed newspapers, lace fans, needlework patterns, and embroidered handkerchiefs.  PC received a box of his grandfather’s cufflinks, and my father in law had found even more of Grandma’s lurid recipes from the 1940s and 1950s, pasted onto index cards and stored neatly in a tin box. 

A cast iron peach peeler.  Club aluminum cookware.  Old report cards.  Old jewelry.

After a while, I had to put it away and close the cedar chest.  I was starting to feel sad, looking at these artifacts of people who had passed away months or decades ago.  Someday, we’ll be memories, and our treasures will be artifacts at the mercy of someone else’s interest or affection. 

But for now, we’re living.  Tonight we’ll wash the dinner dishes and look at the pictures we took of the little girls playing with dolls, and I’ll listen to the voices of my husband and his father in the back yard, talking about Mark Twain and gas mileage.  My daughter is on her bed reading a book and the cedar chest is closed up tight, the treasures of the past neatly packed under the heavy lid.

There was nothing in that chest that talked about what these people discussed over dinner with friends, or what their everyday life was like.  When it is time to store up my artifacts, what will it be?  A bowl?  Some tupperware?  A book or two?  Or will it be a grocery list, a scrap of paper from a notebook where I jotted down something funny I overheard, or a stack of photos I couldn’t give up?

My, what a depressing post!!!