The Things We Keep

winner---12/21/2009

ID: 896794   (Rated: 13+) Daily Flash Fiction Challenge  Enter your story of 300 words or less. Note new starting time! by arakun the twisted raccoon

                                         THE THINGS WE KEEP

         Things accumulate in a house as people live there year after year.  Moving makes you face what a pack rat you’ve been.  There is a saying three moves are as good as a fire when it comes to getting rid of stuff.

         Alex hadn’t expected to move from this house.  He thought, when he and Jenny bought this place back in the fifties, after the war and college, and all that they would stay here as  long as they lived.  This house was where their children grew up, where they celebrated their lives.

         When the kids were all home, he wanted to finish the attic and make bedrooms there but there was never the money to do it.  Now he was looking at dusty boxes that contained the gatherings of a lifetime.  Where to begin?

         Everything was alive with memories.  Things of Jenny’s, things she kept because of what they meant to her.  Now he had to decide what to keep.  Not very much; his new apartment was small. 

         There was so much of Jenny in this attic!  He pulled out a box and opened it.  Jenny had written “Christmas Stuff” on the lid.  The box contained plastic evergreen boughs and poinsettia flowers.  A bit of tinsel was clinging to one of the boughs.

         A long cycle of memory arose.  Jenny put up these artificial boughs that first Christmas of their life together in the tiny apartment they had while he was at school.  She saved them to have their place in every Christmas ever after, carefully storing them away because to her they were precious. 

         A door opened and closed downstairs and a voice called,  “Dad?”

         It was Mark, come to help him pack.  Wiping tears Alex replied,  “Up here.”

292 words