Attic Adventures

A place that was off limits to us children and yet held so many interesting things. Our attic was filled with boxes and all manner of interesting things. It was my dream to be able to explore it to my hearts content.

Every winter Mom would clean and reorganize it since it had received many deposits during the previous year and everything needed to be put in order so she would know where to find things if she needed them.

In the evening after supper we would all bundle up in our winter coats and light several Coleman lanterns and make our way to the attic. Mom would take a chair along and sit in the middle and John and I would push and drag the boxes to her where she would look to see what was inside and then tell us where to put it.

There were boxes filled with books that she would go through to find some that we could add to our bookshelf since we could read at a higher level since the last time we had cleaned the attic. There were boxes of clothes that had to be sorted and hand me downs doled out the the happy brothers that could now wear their older siblings favorite shirt.

There were puzzles and games and box after box filled with toys. We could each choose several we wanted to add to our toy box downstairs but we had to exchange them with some we had played with the previous year. So it took a lot of thought which toys we were willing to give up in order to have some others to play with.

There were rows and rows of boxes with empty canning jars, which had to be sorted so that once canning time came the next summer we could easily find the jars we needed. Mom found large empty boxes and set them in front of the rows of jars and marked them and gave us instructions that every Saturday when we carried the weeks worth of empty jars to the attic we should put them in the correct boxes.

It took several evenings to get everything done. It had been so much fun seeing everything and now we could spend the rest of the cold winter nights with games, puzzles, and toys that we hadn't seen for a year. Next year we would put those back and choose some others, that way we never grew tired of what we had available.