The garage that time forgot....

Our garage was a big mess. At the back of it we had big boxes secured tightly with brown tape and marked with things like ‘kitchen’ or ‘living room’. They had arrived on the lorry from Belfast seven years ago and got lost among the vast amount of other useless clutter that we have managed to accumulate in our time together.
When I walked into our garage I was always reminded of that scene from the X-files when Mulder and Scully found a huge warehouse that had boxes full of secrets as far as the eye could see. The boxes in our garage do not contain ancient lost artifacts or solid gold tablets that Jesus Christ wrote his shopping list on. It’s more a case of old framed pictures, ancient bills and toys with bits broke off them that I couldn’t bear to throw out.
We decided to tackle the monster last weekend and finally clear the thing out. The husband has big ideas for the place that doesn’t necessarily include my big ideas of filling it with more rubbish moved in from the house.
We opened boxes that hadn’t seen the light of day for seven years. Every item had a memory attached, every scrap of paper told a story. It was like opening a time capsule to a previous existence.
In one box I found a case with all our very important documentation (so very, very important it has been hidden at the back of the garage for seven years).
I found a contract of employment from one of my first employers and it took me back to the excitement I felt at becoming a real live journalist, getting handed money to do the two things that I loved most – talking and writing. I remember looking at my yearly income – the heady sum of £11,000 – and thinking I had won the actual lottery.
I found the mortgage details from our very first house in North Belfast. We bought a three storey house on the peaceline for £13,000. I remember the husband, who was then the boyfriend, and I almost passing out at what we thought was an absolute fortune.
In the same box I found a small yellow plastic duck on a string. The boy, who now almost reaches my shoulders, used to pull this duck everywhere behind him as he toddled around our Belfast home. It would quack as it moved. It used to drive us insane. But I pulled it along the garage floor and it brought back those early, nervous days when we first started out on this journey. All wet behind the ears as to how kids worked, stumbling in the dark, tripping over the obstacles of brand new parenthood.
I looked at that little duck and out the garage window at the tall handsome boy wrestling with his brother in the garden and thought how far we’d come, how many blessings we’ve been given in those days and since.
In the same box I found a letter from my father in his beautiful, swirly handwriting. It was in the days before email – yes I’m that old – texts, pages, electronic everything. Yes, there were phones but my Dad adored writing letters and how I love finding these little reminders of him around our house. Reading his turn of phrase is almost like talking with him again. All of them signed off with ‘Love Dad x’. They are all little treasures.
There are framed pictures – a youthful us in France before weddings and christenings were even thought of; the husband as a schoolchild, a mirror image of our boys; a picture of the husband’s mother – who died before she met our youngest children – and the pictures from the day our son made us a family. All special, all lost and now found.
There were boxes marked ‘toys to fix’ which were packed with cars with only three wheels, action figures with limbs missing and teddies who had seen better days. We found the computerised bunny that talked, which malfunctioned one night and led us into thinking someone had broken into our house and was asking people in a southern American accent to ‘follow me’.
There was too much, too little-used exercise equipment to mention. There was a skiing machine, a rowing contraption and a thing, which enabled the user to swing arms and legs wildly at the same time. Walking from the sofa to the kettle burnt more calories than the grand total of calories clocked up on all of the above. In the skip they went alongside old chairs that we never got around to upholstering and huge cabinets that wouldn’t have looked out of place in a 70’s parlour – you know the ones, everyone’s elderly aunt has one.
In the skip went rusty tent poles, clutter inherited from relatives and useless DIY paraphernalia that we bought on sale thinking we might one day need them.
But there was a small box set aside for special stuff. Things to add to my memory chest – Daddy’s letters, a portrait my eldest son did of me when he was three years old (big round face, gigantic orange eyes, spiky black hair) and the pictures which tell the story of our lives. Little treasures, all of them.