My Barrel

We were getting ready for an event and my friend had found barrels for us to paint as part of the decor. They were dirty and dented and rusty and I almost broke into tears. I hadn't thought of it in years, but when it hit it was like an earthquake and not those little tremors we knew in Quito in the every day life. Like the earthquakes that knock things off your shelf and make you realize how very small and at the will of the earth you are.

I pictured mine, with its ridged metal sides and spray-painted letters that had been taped over with paper and more letters. Its rusted lid and metal hinged circle that I had to fight closed skillfully avoiding rusty edges because it may have never belonged to my barrel in the first place. I picture the way, twice a year, that I would have to dip over its edge to put in or pull out the pieces of my life.

Not my actual barrel but close

When I first got my barrel I was in fifth grade and had to climb in because I was too small to bend over and reach things at the bottom. My last year, a senior, I emptied it for the last time, bent over, pulling out the accumulated life I had built for myself in this place.

In so many ways my barrel can be a symbol for my life. We were legacies, like the barrel that was handed from family to family, each name being substituted for the next, painted on next to its last owners, or papered over so if you pulled back the tape you could see the history, passed down out of necessity but with pride. It was where I packed up my life each year to head home from boarding school. It stayed, stored away, like my personality in many ways, in that dark room until we all trudged out of the busy airport and up the tiled stairs into our whitewashed rooms where our barrels waited to spill out our next journey.

I just read a blog post by Marilyn on Communicating Across Boundaries that made me think of my barrel again. I have no clue what happened to it since the dorm has been converted into classrooms. Maybe it was thrown out with our closets that held our etched names and stories within it. Maybe it was hidden away with the identity of the building. "What do you mean, the 'AA Dorm'? Oh, that building- That was a dorm?"

A barrel is such a little and meaningless thing, and yet it holds such a huge value in my memories. It's a hard thing to explain to people. I've tried a million times to help my husband hold a metal barrel in the same regard that I do (hint: it doesn't work, a barrel is still a barrel to him). But to me it will stand in as my pseudo roots in a place where I lived and grew and was shaped for so much of my transitory life.

What items do you have that hold no real value except to your heart and memories?