Lists

Years earlier when we didn’t have a TV at the cottage, we would play a board game – or cards – nearly every night. Or, at least, that is how I remember it. That hadn’t happened for years when my father posted this list on the outside of the cabinet where the games were stored.

My Dad made a small space – not really a room, more like a large closet – in the rebuilt cottage where we spent our summers as children. He went in there to smoke when it was too cold or dark outside. The space had built-in cabinets that he had removed from the basement of our home in Shamokin - floor-to-ceiling, they lined all the walls -  except for a desk-like area.  There he maintained a small collection of tiny plastic wind-up toys among the miscellaneous pocketknife, harmonica, whistles, matches, pencils and crosswords books. Above his head he installed an exhaust fan that he believed extracted all of his pipe or cigarette smoke. It didn’t. The smoke drifted beyond the curtain he put up to block it as well as the door to the TV space where the rest of us usually sat.

Months after the flood, some things remained on the cabinet shelves. The board games – soggy and dank – were already thrown out by someone by the time I got there. I threw the remaining stuff into a garbage can and accidentally got my shoes wet when I moved something I didn’t know had water in it. I set a few things aside, among them, a box of stereoscopic slides and a small viewing mechanism. The slides were of me and my siblings; they were taken by a professional photographer – probably at Sears - when I was about three. They were tucked far in the corner near some other artifacts whose meanings my father had assigned, - meanings known to no one now.