Spring Cleaning

When he sent his kids off to college, his wife demanded that they clean out the attic. No longer would it be messy and full of crap they didn’t need. Who knew what they would put in there but they were consumers, he was sure that they would find something. He opened the door to his attic and the smell of sawdust and must flowed out, as the fan in the adjacent room pulled the air towards itself. He creaked up the steps in his socks and when he reached the top he stopped to look around. Dozens of cardboard boxes piled on top of each other and made the project look much more formidable than it previously had. He started with a top box of a pile way in the corner, opened it up, creaked down the steps with it in his arms, and threw it into the back of the car. He did the same for the rest in the pile until he had reached the last one. When he reached the last one, he noticed that it was dusty and hadn’t been opened for some time. It figured. He had realized at his first child’s first birthday that he was not the nostalgic person he had once thought he was. He read the label. “Italian” was scrawled in a sharpie across the front. He opened it and looked inside. It was full of cut-aways and no break trousers that he had stopped wearing long before his first child was born. He shrugged and closed the box back up and took it out to the car.

When he started to take the second pile out to the car, he read the label of the top box. It read, “Americana/timeless”. He didn’t even bother to open it up as he picked it up and took it down the stairs.