Jaci Dawn

I finally tackled the Christmas tree. It’s always a huge project because I am, among other things, a bit OCD about how things get packaged, marked, and stored. I have pared down my decorations, but it is still a process. We also live in a house that is a little under 1100SF with very little extra storage room so I have to be creative about how I store things.

Fortunately, we lived in much tighter spaces when the children were growing up and I’ve learned how to be very creative with storage.

Unfortunately, we have amassed more possessions since the children moved away (and some of what we store is theirs, as yet unclaimed).

I got the Christmas things all put away and tucked neatly into the stairwell closet (formerly the Harry Potter Room when our grandchildren were littler)). I was sweaty and dirty by then, but on a roll.

I climbed the stairs to the loft and looked at the space we call the attic (really more of a crawl space that is about 10×6′ and 4′ tall in the center). Out came everything and I pushed all of my husband’s model railroad boxes into the very back. I’ve left those boxes out for the past seventeen-plus years even though I had room in the attic – maybe one day, he’ll build that N-scale model railroad.

Or maybe not. I decided to go with “not anytime soon” and cleared the loft of all those cluttery boxes (is “cluttery” a word?). Knee pads are essential when working in the attic as the entrance is an old window frame from before the house was added onto and you have to crawl over the sill. My knees aren’t what they were when I was twenty. Neither is my back. Or my shoulders.

I got that done and everything else put back into the attic as well. Now I have more space for books in the loft (I promise I am going to thin those out this year – I already have a large bag in the back of my car to take to the paperback exchange store).

The last thing I did was to haul the Fairy box into my studio. I knew what was in it: cassettes of 1980’s Country music. I haven’t looked at it since I brought it home in 2011, after Dad died. It’s a little cobwebby. And it is full of cassettes, but not exactly the genre of music I thought.

There are Country albums, some Western, some Tex Ritter, and some ‘mix’ tapes, but there are a lot of duplicate Clancy Brothers collections, Reader’s Digest Christmas collections, Henry Mancini, marches, and other dubious entertainment collections.

Also tucked inside was a cassette inside a white envelope with my mother’s name on it, written in my Aunt Donna’s handwriting: Mary Lou.

Now, I happen to have this fancy cassette-to-mpv converter my father bought in March of 2011. He bought it for me, so I could convert a cassette interview of my Gramps (his father) to a digital format. I’ve never done it. I’ll get back to that in a minute.

I got the mini cassette player out and dropped in Mom’s tape (after removing the cassette of Gramps that I have never converted) and hit the play button. It’s a recording of my mother’s mother’s Memorial Service. Grandma Em, as she is affectionately known by her descendants, passed in 1991.

Actually, it is only half the Memorial Service as someone forgot to flip the cassette over mid-scripture, but half a service is more than I had before. And half a service prompted me to see if I could figure out how this converter worked.

Let’s see: Dad bought it in 2011… That was several versions of Microsoft ago…Hmmm. Well, what the heck? I put the CD-Rom into my drive and waited. And I’ll be darned if the thing isn’t compatible with Windows 10 all these years later!

Guess what I will be doing? Finally converting that interview with Fritz Wilcox (Gramps) to a digital format. And figuring out how to pass some lovely Reader’s Digest music compilations on… Barbara Mandrell, anyone?