There it is -- The Pile. What you see at left is every picture, document, certificate, or other scrap of memorabilia I have pertaining to the family I grew up in. I acquired this "stuff" (for lack of a better term) in 1985, after my father died. My mother quickly sold their home in Florida and returned north to live with her sister. She brought with her only her clothes, her violin, and her typewriter. She sent on ahead two or three cartons of things she thought important enough to save.

They arrived at my sister's house one rainy day in July of that year. I went through some of the things, and brought back with me a collection of pictures and documents. Some were loose in envelopes and folders, others mounted in (picture here my historic preservationist's shudder) magnetic albums. Some of the documents were rolled and tied with ribbon, others were folded to fit picture frames where the nails had left rusty marks in the creases.

Even then I considered myself something of a personal historian. I liked to read thick "generational sagas," with tree charts on the end papers. Most of what I knew about the Civil War came to me from Mary Chestnutt's diary, and I'd read straight through Sylvia Plath's Letters Home even though I didn't like her poetry very much. Genealogies, webs of relationships -- that's what fascinated me.

I wasn't writing seriously then, although I was keeping a diary, irregularly, the "I had a pork chop for dinner" kind. I was pregnant with my daughter, due in September. My parents had visited in June, and I remarked to them that I thought my child was fortunate. Even though she would be born to "older parents" (we were 38 and 48), she would have four living grandparents.

Now one was gone, taking with him everything he knew about his family history except his parents' names, which he'd written down for me, so I'd have the mysterious Russian and Polish spellings right.

I spent two weeks or so sifting through the stuff. Then we had a hot spell where the temperature didn't go below 90 for three weeks, and then Lynn was born. The carton, a little more ordered than before, got put out of sight behind the piano. I knew I'd get to it, eventually.

Lynn turns fourteen in less than five months. She has only one grandparent left now. Her beloved great-aunt and great-uncle are gone too, and their pictures and personal papers are stacked neatly in the space where The Pile used to be. "Eventually" has become NOW. Come with me as I make of this material a usable past.