IT'S IN THE ATTIC

There's an attic in everyone's life. Some cobwebby place where important things get stored. Often to be forgotten. But meant never to be lost.

My attic is now where I can no longer reach. It sits in the dusty silence of that great red brick bungalow now owned by someone I don't even know. The home in which my family and I grew up together so many long years past. Living, loving, crying, and of course enshrining prized items up there we knew we would forever honor.

Everything you can think of, smile over, or cry at. Christmas wrappings...photo albums...gloves and scarves for the next winter, bathing suits and picnic baskets for the next summer...sentimental toys we never wanted to give up... needlework gems from Grandma and that scarred cornet from Grandpa...extra batteries we planned to use ...cherished autograph books our classmates signed and who we knew we would always remember...sheet music and LP records we intended never to give up...special toys and radio premiums (especially that 1939 Jack Armstrong hike-o-meter)...oh, and thick scrap books (like the WWII newspaper clippings liturgically cut and pasted from 1941 to the day the boys finally came marching home in 1945).

Our attic was not simply a storage room. More like a museum. A sacred palace where sacred moments were sealed, to be unwrapped only when and how the gathered family chose. As a kid you often visited the shadowy cathedral, but you never tarried long. After all, there would be time enough.

Only that time doesn't always come.

Children grow up and move away. Parents die. Neighbors change. The empty bungalow is sold. To whom, why, when and how is not yours to know. Only that whenever you drive past its aging face, you can almost hear it weep for you. You think of that great dark attic. What have they done with it? Why did you all forget about it? Yes, a quick post-funeral cleaning, but how come no one ever thought about together unsealing its gifts as reverently as we sealed them?

Too late. Too long ago. Too many relics gone with the wind. Somehow, though, the memory can fondle each lost treasure. And the heart, well, it can see each one again in all its living splendor. Like a family, a community and a nation needs to keep remembering and honoring who, why and how it got here.