Relearning who I am or was or something

Originally posted on Karl Hakkarainen's Holden Blog at OnTheCommon.com.
It started last year after we'd had a free energy audit sponsored by the municipal light department. The inspector noted several places where we could do a better job of insulating the house. One place was in the attic. The fiberglass batting was in disarray, in need of rearrangement, if not replacement.
Quite a few years ago, we adopted a house rule that nothing goes into the attic unless something comes out. And, for those years, that steady-state had served us well. Now, however, we needed to empty the attic so that we can take care of the insulation.
Of course, the stuff that had gone into the attic was there precisely because we didn't know what to do with it. My mother, who lived with us for the last years of her life, died nearly 10 years ago. Busily, uncertainly, and perhaps even cowardly, I'd put several boxes of her papers in the attic in the hopes that some wiser person would know what to do with them.
There was one large plastic bin with a yellow Post-It® note that said "Discard if not needed by 1/2010." The bin contained mostly her financial records, including canceled checks, bank statements, and receipts. Those things were easy. Into the wood stove, they went.
Succeeding layers are harder because it's not clear what they mean. Other boxes included some of my father's papers. In that dig, we've hit a layer of pictures of old Finns who are indistinguishable from other pictures of old Finns. These were pictures from my father's parents. (They died 35 years ago.) Amid the stacks of nimetön vanhasuomalaiset were a few pictures of my grandparents in their 20s, my grandmother pregnant with my uncle.
My mother's collection includes pictures of her family on the dairy farm in Jaffrey and some others dating to the time when that family lived in Worcester in the 20s.
Yet another archive included letters that I wrote to Sandra when I was in college and we were courting. These are letters that are hard to read, but we did.
Those people who wrote and read those letters back then are an essential part of who we are now. Makes the brain hurt, doesn't it? The letters show, among other things, how close I was to getting things grievously wrong. It's not that I wanted or want a different outcome; I just wish that it had been easier on us all.
I'm not one who says that everything turns out just as it's supposed to. (That's a discussion for another day.) But I also know, and the idea was reinforced in some of my mother's letters, that if you change one thing, you change everything.
So we read on, watching the story unfold even as we know the outcome. We stare at the pictures to see these people in the hopes of seeing ourselves, and come away alternately enriched and overwhelmed.
In one sweet taste of irony, I had written to Sandra about a course I was taking, a course on historical research methods, given by one of my favorite professors. I was to learn about the procedures for reading primary sources and then writing important analyses about people's lives. I aced the course.