TREASURE TRUNK

You can’t contain a childhood in a single object, but we could stash several summers’ worth in our grandparents’ old wash house trunk. And believe us, they’d all have fit.

“That trunk was unlike anything I’d ever seen before,” recalled Cheryl. “Or since! And believe me, we searched high and low in hopes of finding one for this catalog. It was about the size of a twin bed, truly just enormous; you can imagine how massive that seemed to small children, and how bottomless the treasure felt.”

The trunk itself was a rich dark wood, sturdy and sound, with a lid so heavy that opening it was a team effort for us as kids. It contained a multitude of garments once donned by the generations before us, dating back to our great-great-grandmother; everything from petticoats to summer Sunday dresses – even a wedding dress or two – and all the trimmings from bonnets to glasses to gloves.

We could play in it all day, for days on end. We spent entire summers sifting through that massive trunk, and in a way, that trunk will forever house a heap of our childhood.