"Mom?" Steven asked as he entered his parents house.
"Back here, sweetheart."
He followed her voice back to his old bedroom. He saw his mother, Lisa, sitting on a folding chair in the middle of the room surrounded by several boxes. The boxes to her right looked old, and some of them were literally falling apart while the boxes on her left were obviously new.
"Hey mom," he said, "What is all this?"
Lisa looked up and blew a lock of her blonde hair out of her face. "Hey kiddo," she said, despite the fact that her son was 25, "A bunch of old stuff we kept meaning to go through but never got around to."
"Wait," Steven said, "Isn't this all the crap you guys had in the garage?"
"Yep," Lisa said, "When you moved out, your father and I moved all this in here thinking it would be easier to eventually sort through and... well, you can see how well that worked out."
"I see," he said, laughing, "So is this what you needed my help with?"
Lisa had called her son that morning and asked if he was free to help her out with something. She didn't specify what.
"Yeah," she said, "So grab a chair and give me a hand."
Steven grabbed a second folding chair from the corner of the room and sat down opposite his mother, "So why isn't dad helping you with this? Come to think of it, where is dad?"
Lisa sighed and rolled her eyes, "He's helping your Uncle Matt with that fucking car."
His uncle was a car enthusiast, and had just recently bought a 1966 Plymouth Fury and was planning on fully restoring it. He enlisted the help of Steven's father, Sam, in the restoration. They had only been at it for a week, but they knew a project of this magnitude could take up to a year, and since it was just the two of them, it might take longer.
"I figured since I had some free time, I'd finally go through all this stuff, and since there's so much of it, I'd need some help." Lisa said.
Steven didn't mind, he liked spending time with his parents. They had always been supportive of Steven. No matter what they were always there for him, and he promised himself that when the time came, he would be there for them. After he moved out he checked in with his parents at least twice a month, either through phone calls or visits. He had a spare set of keys to their house, just in case.
"So what exactly is all this?" he asked.
"So all this stuff," she said, indicating the boxes on her right, "Is a bunch of old pictures and paperwork and who knows what else that we've accumulated over the years. So I'm basically deciding what needs to be kept and what needs to be thrown out. These old boxes are falling apart, so we got the new boxes for the stuff we're keeping. Everything else, obviously goes in the trash."
"So you're just moving crap from one box to another?"
"For now," Lisa said, "Once we get everything sorted we'll figure out what to do with it. We won't let it sit in boxes for another 20 years. So pick a box and dig in."
Steven reached into the nearest box and pulled out an envelope filled with a bunch of pictures. "Hey mom, who are all these people?"
Lisa took the pictures and smiled, "Oh wow. Okay, so these two, those are my grandparents, your great grandparents, they died before you were born. That's grandma and grandpa, and that little girl is me."
"That's grandpa?" Steven asked, "But he has hair!"
Lisa laughed, "Believe it or not, your grandfather didn't always look like Patrick Stewart."
"And look at you," Steven said, sifting through the pictures, "With those chubby little cheeks. I just wanna pinch them!"
"You pinch me and you'll be pulling back a bloody stump, mister," Lisa said laughing. "I couldn't have been more than two years old when these were taken."
It turned out that the box contained a whole bunch of old pictures from Lisa's side of the family. However most of them were taken before she was born, and were from the early days of her parents' marriage. Lisa obviously wanted to keep them.
As they went through the boxes, they found more old family pictures, some of Sam's side of the family, some of Steven as a kid, and a few more from Lisa's side of the family. They found old papers from when Steven was a baby up until his high school years, including drawings, homemade birthday cards to his parents, progress reports and report cards.
"These bring back a lot of memories," Lisa said.
"How come you never put these pictures in a photo album?" Steven asked.
"I don't know. I guess we used all the photo albums for your baby pictures, these were put aside for later, and we just forgot about them." Lisa said, "Plus, most of the older pictures were given to us by your grandparents for safekeeping. They were worried they might lose them."