Just Framing Photographs

I, too, started my packing today. Mom and I went to Wal-Mart, where we bought towels, a comforter, a garbage can, and a new pillow. Hard core stuff. When I got home, I went downstairs to root through some old boxes to find a few things to put in my room in St. John's. Out of the cubby hole downstairs I pulled a tuberware box with a cover painted bright blue and signed with the names Meagan and Heather and one beastly and one stubby handprint.

I know I'm being silly. Excitement and new beginnings wait for me in university - I know this, and I'm looking forward to it. And I'll be back again on Thanksgiving weekend. And I'll be able to return to my hometown and house after the semester is over.

But when I think back to that night in the summer before we started high school, as we painted a box to be filled with sentiment and opened on a date that, in the back of our minds, we really believed would never come, I could cry.

I hope you don't mind, Heather, but I'm taking the box with me.