Crayons, green houses, red hotels and Playdoh

This weekend I helped my Mom and Dad clean out what we lovingly call "the playroom". Nothing has been 'played' in this room for years. Many moons ago, when this room was conceived by my parents and built by my Grandaddy it was a storage/play area. We had a ping pong table, dart board, various play areas. I remember wearing my roller skates and playing ping pong at the same time. The added difficulty must have gained me some knowledge, havent discovered what yet. My brother and I would see who could hit the ball the hardest. We also played a million games of darts. Probably not by any rules heard anywhere in the world, but we had fun. I found that dart board this weekend, it is barely holding together there are so many holes in it!

There were also boxes and boxes of our childhood toys, games and things. Puzzle pieces, game pieces, marbles, Legos, trains, books, on and on. It was fun uncovering some of these things. My brother and i had a lot of fun discovering these small treasures. An old red metal trunk full of Adventure People and Legos, two of my brothers favorite toys. Our old Monopoly game, not all the pieces we there, I think I found them all by the time we finished. I kept finding little green houses and red hotels. My favorite thing was uncovering Cootie pieces. The Cootie game was a strange game where you rolled the die to pick pieces to build, well, a bug. Why was this a game, much less a popular game in the 70's? Who knows but my Aunt and I played it till we built every bug size, shape and color combination available. I still have one, Cootie Bug that is!

Why do we hang on to all of this junk? Why does my Mom keep an old Monopoly game with hotels and houses missing? Dice that are missing from who knows what game. Puzzle pieces, paint brushes, dried jars of paint, crayons.

Opening an old metal can filled with crayons was wonderful when the smell of them hit my nose. Brought back thousand of memories of coloring old scraps of paper, construction paper, coloring books and melting old broken ones between pieces of wax paper with my Mom to make stained glass windows for a cardboard church we built. And then there's Playdoh, I didn't find any while cleaning, I always took great care of my Playdoh, it never would of ended up hard in an old box! I never even let the colors touch each other, if they mixed, it couldnt go back into the contaner!



All of these things hold memories. Its like each piece when discovered released that memory back into the air. Small time capsules with our fingerprints all over them.