A Delayed Valentine

My parents finally sold their house here in Memphis, which means that all of my "history" that has been stored in their attic for years had to be gone through.  Seeing that we have very limited storage here, there just isn't room to bring it all home, so I took one measly rubbermaid box and resolved to only bring home what would fit in the box.  When I got to mom and dad's I realized what big job that would be.  There were no less than 7 large boxes filled with all kinds of things.  Stories I'd written in elementary school, old shot records, boxes and boxes of old CDs....and most importantly...boxes of memorabilia from old boyfriends.

Now, I had a reason for keeping all of this stuff.  My mom had a serious boyfriend in high school and afterwards and I always wanted to know more about him and their relationship but she had cut him out of every picture and done away with anything related to him.  I decided at a young age to keep the things my boyfriends gave me so that my daughters would be able to see them.  Now that I'm not so young, and as I was going through all of these dried flowers, pictures, and many many love notes (oh yea...you know it) I felt nauseated.  This is not the reaction I was expecting.

I had expected that reading these expressions of undying love would warm my heart and make me feel nostalgic.  Nope.  The boxes started with the first boyfriend and went all the way up to the one who beat them all.  While sitting on that cold garage floor, feeling almost embarrassed at the amount of time, energy, and pieces of my heart that I had wasted, I came across the first place I ever wrote down Jonathan's phone number.  It made me smile.  I called him Jon back then.  Then I found the picture of us on Valentine's day back in 2003 when he drove all the way up to Knoxville to play with me in my first concert.  Immediately my nausea was replaced with warm fuzzies and gratitude.   I was wearing these terrible plaid pants and had a less than fortunate haircut and way too much lipstick.  I was singing with the guy that I had a crush on, was being accompanied on piano by a guy who I later found out had a crush on me, and that was the first night that I started being "wooed" by a guy I ended up actually dating for a little while.

I sang songs about lost love, broken heartedness, anxiety about the future...blah blah blah.  All the while my future husband sat just behind me, backing me up and making my mediocre musical offerings sound infinitely better.  All for a hug and a thanks and a 6 hour drive home.  Now that's the kind of guy you want to fall in love with right!  Well, luckily, 3 years later I came to my senses and let myself fall for the most wonderful man I've ever known.  I'm so very glad that I did.

So, since there was no room in my box for all of that memorabilia, and all of those letters and pictures and dried up old flowers didn't do anything for me anymore, and my dad had a big bon fire going to burn up the trash (in the country...it was legal...and safe...ish)....I put all of my burnable history in the pile and said goodbye.  It wasn't hard to do.  It wasn't even bittersweet.  It was really nice.

I texted Jonathan a picture of the fire and told him that all of my old love letters and stuff were in there.  He replied "hunka hunka burnin love."  It only made me love him more!