[Reece]

About ten or twelve years ago I was rummaging around in an abandoned house. A friend of mine and I were there to do some HVAC repairs (which I used to do on the side) for the landlord who was fixing the place up. The previous tenant had skipped and left a lot of stuff. Landlord said take what you want, the rest is going to the dump. One thing was a small 35mm camera which I took and used until getting a digital. Then there was a big box of books and letters etc. that I became fascinated with. It was the entire life, it would seem, of a lady who was a nurse. There were letters etc. in there from the 1920's on. Envelopes full of black and white pictures and negatives. In one she and some other women were standing as if Sunday dressed next to a beautiful '38 Buick, parked on the beach somewhere, I had to believe in New England as there were other references to that region. The wind was blowing their long dresses, they were holding onto their hats. She collected Chrismas Seals, there were bunches of them there and a letter to the Christmas Seal Society asking for more. Letters back and forth from some institution where her brother was being taken care of; he was somehow disabled. The more I read her letters, her drycleaning bills, her drugstore invoices, she became real to me.

I tried on the internet, via searches, checks on genealogical sites, to connect with someone who might be her relative and might want this wealth of information, but to no avail. I couldn't just throw it out, the lifetime of a person. She was apparently what we used to call a maiden lady. Finally on a lead found on the cardboard box I found a name and searched and contacted a man. He came back to me and said that he had given this box of stuff to another person (the one who skipped the house) to try to help that guy out, to see if he could sell some of the old photographs and such on that auction site. Apparently there is a market for these. However nothing came of that effort. He said that he had acquired the box at an auction along with much other stuff, and that the family auctioning it did not want it any more.

I could not imagine a family throwing away part of its history like that but there are uncaring people in the world. I asked if I could and I finally sent it back to the man that I had contacted. At least I didn't have it any more, and I wasn't the one to throw it out. I really felt bad about having it around and felt bad for the maiden lady whose entire presence in this world was contained in that dusty cardboard box. Sic transit gloria mundi.