Finally found my marbles

It was time to clean my room for the last time. It's the room I grew up in - the room I…OK, that's enough personal stuff. But at the back of a drawer I found a treasure. My old roller skate key. The dirty cotton cord I used to hang the key around my neck was gone, but the key was there.

My friends and I spent summers skating in the driveway and basement with our metal skates insecurely tightened around our sturdy school shoes. They had to have stitchedon soles so the skates would clamp tightly. We all wore the skate key around our necks because the longer we skated, the looser the skates got.

It was years before the Olympics came to our living room, so I never envisioned myself in a twirly skirt leaping and landing gracefully on one foot. My skates might have fallen off if I had gotten too energetic.

I could go on about how it brought back memories of my childhood friends and how I wondered where they are now. But I didn't. We were on a mission to go through everything in the house before it is sold. No time for musing - sorting to be done.

My marbles had been stashed in my dad's office, though I am certain he never sat down and shot one across the carpet. I loved the swirl of color in the middle of the glass balls and the mix like someone had stirred the molten glass. My shooters were missing, though. They were the big ones. We used to trade marbles, so maybe I traded them for something I thought was more important.

I don't remember any rules for playing marbles - just those colors. Maybe I should have become a marble designer.

There wasn't much left of me in that house. I have been gone for decades. I think the first 10 years I was married, I left the house with more than I arrived with as my mother returned my third-grade artistic masterpieces, my 12 years of report cards and my ceramic Lady bank (from the Lady and the Tramp film). I must have thrown away any evidence of genius because I can't find it now.

My doll collection is packed away in the attic. I can't understand why my parents didn't want it. I have one from every place we lived or visited - value yet to be determined. The crayon marks across the face of one may have devalued it. That is the cost of having a younger sibling. And I remember restyling the hair of another. She has never forgiven me.

We drove back with a backseat full of leaves. I took cuttings from my favorite trees, stuck them in beer bottles and brought them home. Bottles in a half case stand upright, don't spill and hold the cuttings straight. That is the only reason I have them. Really.