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My goal this year was to stop holding on. To documents. To narratives. One of the last vestiges of this search was the storage space underneath the stairs. A moldy, shadowed space, it hid seven plastic tubs. The tubs held my classroom teaching materials.

My goal this year was to stop holding on. To narratives. My classroom teaching life and story used to be synonyms. They hadn’t been for sometime. I decided to search for the section I wrote about the tubs in a section from my memoir manuscript, Strings in Our Hands.

My manuscript files used to live in Dropbox on Word documents. This year I transferred them to Google. The Find/Replace function isn’t the same, making it for difficult to search for specific terms. This means the search term you use matters more. More importantly, it means that after you locate the word, you must be better at gathering your bearings in the work to understand if the word selected really is the one for which you look.

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Rain threatened. I folded up my shower curtain map of the world still spread out across the grass. My eyes caught on Wisconsin and then Guatemala. Both were yellow, one of the reasons I bought the shower curtain in the first place. René came back to the table, and book by book the colorful display disappeared. I dug for a pen so that I could write down the title of a book I wanted to purchase for my niece. “Thank you for the opportunity to do this. I know it’s a sort of charity. You don’t need me,” I said.

René shrugged while writing a few last comments about the storytime that day. “Don’t make yourself crazy,” she cautioned. “Remember you’re just friends with your job right now.” René checked her watch and then searched for scissors. Once in hand she walked a few feet away to cut down the promotional banner.

“I have piles of activities that go with your theme. I left them at home. I haven’t reclassified all my teacher stuff yet. I’ll bring them. I carried so many different envelopes and boxes back and forth, and I never bothered to put them back.”

“Bring anything you have. I’ve got lots of copies.”

The geraniums, Christmas cactus and spider plants had settled into their summer stay on my dad’s porch. The storage space usually protected by a kind of overgrown jungle was now easily accessible and only delicately guarded by the sweet sweeping cream of lace curtains. Those containers held something daunting, perhaps even the answers to the questions I didn’t think I knew. They sat in tubs in the closet along rebelling against their ripped newspaper covers. Even as I had been careful enough to repack instructional materials so they could travel thousands of miles, some of them multiple times, the unbalanced towers leaned precariously on top of the tubs. I transferred the stacked piles but not quickly enough and like ice cream they melted across the floor.

With their pages wilted and bent from the mold and humidity common to old farmhouses, most documents were years old; none of them were what I wanted to talk about. Some of my teacher reflections, case studies and philosophy papers had survived my change of computers several years ago. I was no longer sure how much of a foundation they were for my teacher persona, at least not how I was used to describing it. Other documents pressed flat in folders next to my Barbie car remained preserved by split open binders still clutching academic articles. Had I copied a particular page because I valued it or because someone else did? Was it a justification for one activity over another even if I couldn’t cite the theory from my graduate courses anymore? I feared peeling back that façade.

What if the materials were not that great? Not applicable? Not worth saving and so not worth doing in the first place? What if I didn’t find anything to offer to René? What if after all this time, the pages confirmed that my story was not interesting to read? Or worse yet, I would discover myself as someone worse, “bad”, “stupid”, “lazy”, “quitter”. The quitter wasn’t stupid, despite what many articles from my Master’s coursework had said about teachers, especially about elementary school teachers. The quitter wasn’t unresponsive or unfeeling, despite what my Guatemalan colleagues might have perceived at one point or another. The quitter was just done. The quitter was weak. The quitter had unfulfilled potential and simply walked away.

I looked out the window and breathed the smells lingering in thick air not quite flowing through the window. I knew my father was out in sweet heavy heat somewhere. I envied his hazy summer happiness, the sense of purpose and closure in garden rows. I shrugged my shoulders. I was a hard worker. I would try harder. Trying harder was what caused me to travel thousands of miles to expand definitions of teacher, of teaching, and mostly of me. Trying harder was what I did best. The cracked plastic of the tubs cut against my arms, bulging construction paper colored warts beyond their rectangular shape. Some were broken from the weight of the hanging file folders. I took a deep breath. Then, I hauled each one out of the tiny closet.

I picked at my cuticles and then, I started to pick at the knots in the binding of ten years of teaching. I smiled at students’ names and classroom collaborations, newspaper articles and crafts. One particular piece, reworked by my father’s engineering, was a circular calendar in the shape of a sun. I set the painted wheel aside for the storytime. “Everything has a cycle”, I had repeated often to my students. Planning the storytime activities for René would be an offering of past teaching lives, a kind of sacrifice across a picnic table.

I braced my arms and pushed to make space to file pages in their correct folders. Fifteen years ago these tubs had barely existed, filled only with the materials bestowed upon me by my cooperating teacher Betty, the kind eyed woman clad in glasses and corduroy jumpers. Betty’s grandmother-softness had placed a band aid over doubts of my future in teaching. At that time, my hand hovered more than once over the section of the university website dedicated to studying abroad. My eyes scanned the countries and their possibilities. Instead of Mexico or Spain, I chose Betty. Instead of one beginning to the story, I chose another.

I was the maiden I wrote into the fairy tale Pages that warped more each day in my very humid upstairs room. I rolled my eyes. I knew I was, but I hadn’t wanted to know her, not really. She had pages all over the library floor in my fairy tale just like those that had swallowed the cream carpet underneath my knees. She was unsure of how to retie the beginnings, middles and ends. I had set that fictional maiden out on a journey to find out that she had a choice in her ending. Now that choice was here. The mistakes faded. The indistinct pieces, from a distance, were beautiful images woven together like the water zig zags from strings that had been held with great uncertainty in my hands.

“I would love to hear more about Guatemala,” I had heard over the years. “That would be amazing to travel. I bet you’re an expert.”

For too long, I wasn’t excited to talk, because I didn’t know how. None of the vocabulary seemed right to describe what I did or why I did it. No matter how much I valued my experiences in Guatemala, the past ten years were also cuts, like the scrapes I still had on my wrists from the tubs. Some healed quickly. Others left a mark.

All of my story couldn’t fit into René’s project, not really, but I found that some of me could. There was a story worth telling here. I needed to find a way to write my story not only as I had lived it, but also so that it was livable without leaving important pages out.

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“What is your writing process?" I was recently asked. I framed my answer strategically, except the truth is always, “They reveal themselves as we need them. They reveal themselves with time.”

Completing this search, led me to the text above, but more than that it resulted in one more space that still needed sorting. The words cut from the memoir would not need recycling, donation or burning. When I decided to strike 'delete', they would simply disappear. It's time.