Next Step

So. I had retrieved "the box" from a closet of memories and mess. Old Boy Scout uniforms and a wedding dress--gone, along with years of clutter. But the filthy insect-spotted letters and ancient paper had been rescued and waited in the car with the Old Paris porcelain and Waterford crystal.

I have been uninterested in old family relics and tales that have been stuffed down my throat since I was a baby. Being the only girl in a clan with three brothers, maybe I should have inherited the old family spirit. Alas! All these treasures, these family heirlooms, meant little to me. Nor had they ever. I had resented the constant reminders of the past and wholeheartedly blasphemed the family’s loyalty to “The Lost Cause”. Call me a heritage heretic. All the pieces of the past the family had cherished through the years were pieces of needless debris in my mind.

Traitor that I was, I felt no devotion to those people or things. To make me a bigger turn-coat, the thought occurred to me that I might be able to make some money off some of this stuff. Maybe, the old guys fortuitously waited to endow me with their things for my financial well-being. Funny how the mind goes in circles, especially when it's dizzy with dust, aching from such strain. And dealing with the loss of things that DID matter-like a family home and a mother.

These last four years as I began to organize the stacks of letters and documents, I realized why all the Southern history had been collected in one single place. The Sophie Bibb Chapter of the Daughters of the Confederacy, named for my great-great-great grandmother, stored their archives in the old Bibb home where the group frequently convened. When the home was demolished, most of its belongings went with my grandmother to my house on Thorn Place. The majority of the documents included in my book and on my blog are the remnants of those archives.