DIGGING UP BONES

A rare moment of downtime afforded me the luxury of snooping through my parent's attic one afternoon. Boxes of old books, cards, pictures, letters, school projects, and homemade Halloween costumes filled one corner of the room. Trunks were stuffed with moth-eaten regalia: my Nana's ratty fur coats, my father's old army uniforms, and my mother's Beaver College varsity jackets. There were two dead television sets, a few small appliances waiting for rewiring, and numerous dusty mousetraps - some sprung, and some still set and baited with oily, fossilized cheese. A century of attic heat had kiln dried the rafters - raising the grain and fraying the knob and tube. There was a single window sill, thick with bat droppings and hollow bug carcasses. One bare bulb cast a weak yellow light that created a fading evening ambiance no matter the time of day.

* an excerpt from my cancer memoir "CAR DEALER'S DAUGHTER"