AND MY HOUSE IS HAUNTED TOO!!

STILL GOING THROUGH THE BOXES

With the great help of my Conlon cousin's grandson Mike,  I have  been going through the contents of scores and scores of boxes that were brought here when my house in South Kingston was sold in 2015.  Now they have endured three winters in  our cellar and also in an outdoor screened and covered patio. Last  Spring I began the task of  bringing them in two by two and sorting through all the contents.  I either decide that I will keep the items or  donate then to the Salvation Army, The Pawtucket Public Library  or the Linn Health Center in East Providence. This has become a sort of archeological dig into my past and the past of my mother and Aunt Anna who  bought this house in 1968.  All sorts of things emerge--photos, letters, writings.  And I have come to  believe that when certain things emerge  they are signs that the person who wrote  or left those reminders  wants to be remembered and wants their story told.  

This seems so true about yesterday's finds. I have mentioned that my mother was  a poet and was always writing and reading poetry in the time she could find from working the second or third shift, painting and papering our tenement and  doing all of the housework.  She was a dynamo.

Yesterday we turned  up some of her albums of poems and they were the most complete collection  I had ever seen.  Once I suggested to my  mother that she should keep a  book of all of her  poems and I  bought her a three ring binder and a  box of clear  protectors so that she could keep each page of poetry.  I guess she followed my advice  because yesterday I found a binder full of her faithfully collected poems.  She liked to paste her published work  into  a scrapbook.  But I said that she should keep the poems published or not  and  collect them and that I would try to  put them together some day and self  publish a volume.  Well I think she waited for me to ask for them and to publish them when she was alive.  She must have sent the poems to me because they are with other documents that I kept in a file cabinet --but I never got around to it. I am glad to have the chance to  keep that promise  now
So I  do believe that this is a clarion call--DO YOUR JOB, NORMA.