Sometimes the things we find are more than what we were looking for.

For the past week or so, my family has been packing to move. We’ve been here for 10 years. This wasn’t the first house we’ve lived in, of course, but it feels like we’ve been here a lot longer. And the accumulation of things makes it feel like it is so.

I couldn’t believe the amount of stuff jammed in drawers and closets. Every time I opened a cabinet drawer or pulled out a box in a closet, I found more and more. It felt like finding rusty treasure.

So that’s where that was…

That became my theme song every time I found something that I thought I’d lost. It turns out that often I’d actually hidden it from myself and had forgotten where it was.

I even found twenty dollars rolled up in an envelope that I’d hidden away in a purse. Why? Who knows, but I know it was on purpose because of how perfectly folded and tucked away it was.

So many things. Odds and ends and more odds.

How many pencils did I need? Loose paperclips, single socks, six eyeglass cases, dozens of dry ink pens, and eight tubes of lipstick forever lost in various purses.

The cleaning supplies that were no longer good were endless, and the empty medicine bottles, well…I don’t even remember what we needed the medicine for. I had to Google the names just to find out what they were.

It is amazing the things I held onto just in case, but somehow that moment never seems to come. Sort of like the two sizes small dresses I keep in the corner of my clothes closet waiting for the day that I can fit them again. I bought one of them when I moved in this house.

But someday…

And then beyond the rusty treasures, I found actual things that made me stop packing and spend hours smiling at the trinkets and real treasures that had been hidden away and all but forgotten.

My grandmother’s handwritten recipes and notes on scrap pieces of paper she’d saved for a rainy day.

Photographs that I hadn’t seen in years. Pictures of little cousins who are married with children now, aunts, uncles, cousins, and family friends all gone now, but frozen in a single moment of time.

Boxes of journals that sat dusty in the top of my closet. I smiled at the things I’d written and wondered about what brought me to that space. Who was the boy on page 12 that I thought was so cute? What did my “best friend” do that made me so mad? And what happened to the dreams I filled my pages with?

Perhaps some of them are rusty as well.

The things we tuck away don’t always stay forgotten. Sometimes they quietly wait until we’re ready to find them again.

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