November 13, 2026

For the most part the clean up is unemotional. I sort, trash, donate, and box. But then I’m throwing away decades old glue and tape when I discover this in the bottom of a drawer.

The broken lid of an “It’s a Small World” music box.  Clearly trash.

Except the moment I turned it over I was five again. At Disneyland and believing that “It’s a Small World” was the most magical ride. I remember the feel of the crank in my hand and the sound of the plinking music box. It was a treasure that lived in my treasure drawer inside the pink dresser in the room I shared with two sisters. That dresser doesn’t exist anymore. The box and music are long gone. All I have is this lid, which somehow ended up stored with tools. I think when the box began to break, I asked Grandpa to fix it. And he meant to, but the repair wasn’t an easy one. So he set it aside and forgot about it. The box part was discarded, but this lid had a mirror and mirrors had uses, so he kept that.

I’m holding a broken music box lid that is a connection to a life long gone, a treasure long gone, my grandpa long gone, and I remember how much that little box mattered when I was five.

So. No, it isn’t trash. Not yet. Once I’m gone it will be, because no one else can remember these things. Until I’m gone, I can sometimes pick it up and be connected to what was.  I can’t keep the house, but I can keep this.

A house is the box you keep home in. I thought about that as I rode the plane making my last trip home to California. I’m likely to be in California again multiple times in my life, but after this trip I can’t drive up to the door of the house I grew up in and expect to be let inside. My sister says the house doesn’t matter, what matters is bringing my parents to where we can help care for them. She is right. And she is wrong. I’ve been here for days already and expect to spend a week more. I’m packing and sorting and discarding. As the rooms become empty of objects, they become an easier canvas for me to remember what used to be. I stand in a room and see the shape of it. I remember what it looked like when I was thirty bringing children, when I was fifteen, when I was five. All the changes of paint and flooring and furniture. Standing in the space the memories are close enough to touch, to close my eyes and see.

We’re going to sell the house to people who don’t know the stories, who don’t remember what was. The house, the box of walls, will get new people and a new existence. I will have to try to remember without being surrounded by the walls that held the memory.

This house burned when I was 18. While I was navigating the fall of my freshman year of college, my parents had to live in a rental house while this one was stripped down to studs and rebuilt. When I came home to it shiny and fresh with all new fittings, I felt like I’d lost my childhood home. I mourned for it then. Only to discover that we re-inhabited and old memory made itself cozy again. Thirty more years of family in this space and that fire, which was so devastating at the time, now feels like a blip in the existence of my childhood home.

I contemplate that as I stand in the rooms with memories flicking through my mind like slideshows of bygone eras.  Because the memory isn’t stored in the walls here. I carry it with me. I’ll just have to work harder to access it when I can’t stand in the place where it happened.