This trunk was made to cross oceans, to weather whatever storms life conjured and threw at you. It was constructed tough, a steamer trunk to travel the world, to journey across deserts, to get banged and battered and wet and froze. It was intended to hold everything worth taking, because taking anything was a test of your mettle. It carried all that was necessary, because all that is necessary can fit inside a 2 x 3 wooden trunk. It was minimal.
The steamer trunk was my grandmother’s when she left Ireland, for good, traveling across the world, leaving everything else behind, maybe never to return, to start a new life, to her new home she’d never been before.
Mom-Mom died the year I was born. The only picture I have with her shows her on the couch, showing the effects of cancer, holding me as a baby. I like to think she was instilling her spirit within me, a tough determination to go forth
There was this old trunk in my basement as a kid, buried beneath laundry baskets and holding blankets that hadn’t see the light of day since the 1960s. Always thought it was cool as a kid. I remember my mom, exasperated that we couldn’t put our clothes away in drawers after doing laundry, threatened “to just throw all of my things in a trunk” and I thought that would be the coolest thing. “Maybe I’ll get a trunk and throw all your stuff in it.” I didn’t realize it was a threat, something to motivate me to neatly pile my clothes in the five-drawer bureau with baseball stickers and a Jesus nightlight on top.
Rediscovered the trunk there in their new house, in the basement again, this time beneath boxes for a Roomba robot vacuum and a space heater. It’s showing the years, its wood supports darkened and chipped, it’s canvas covering fading and fraying. But in all its forgotten glory, it still looks cool to me. I rush over to open it and whoooooosh! The smell of musty mothballs just about knocks me over. With my t-shirt pulled up over my face like a Lucky Brand gas mask, I dig into its contents. Random shot glasses and a matchbook collection from the 60s that were ruined from a basement flooding. There’s a box of rags? And a wooden wine box full of news clippings and pictures. The first shows my dad at 14. It strikes me how much I see myself in him, more than any picture I’d seen before. His one-knee stance reminiscent of a football team picture. His floppy dark hair pushed to one side. His knowing smirk that says “Keep it up, kid.”
Spirits of my past, my family, are coming with me, with us, in this trunk we’ve salvaged from basement hell. The spirit of my ancestors at their most adventurous, when the world was big and mysterious and waiting for them to tear it up and remake it in their own image, when life was all before them, when cancer was just a scary word that happened to other people. I never knew my grandmother, Grace, but I feel her coming along with us in True North, her and the others who came before me, paved the road ahead of me. We will fill this trunk with new memories and new dreams and hopes, and carry them along with us, through rain and wind and snow and a world that seems stacked against the lonesome travelers sometimes. This trunk is no storage bin, it’s an altar.
Mom-Mom is guiding us now, a spirit angel on the road, instilling everything she had before she got taken away. It’s all in this trunk and we only have to unpack it now and then. Yes, everything we need can fit inside this trunk. The things we really need don’t take up a lot of space, except in your mind and heart.
