I was French treasure hunting and there was the little box. It was a latch-closed cigar box that caught my eye. Stuffed next to piles of old clothes, butting up against sleeves of a suit dangling off the edge of the shelf, all of it encased in that telltale mustiness. I’ve always considered it odd, what gets my attention. Odd in a curious sort of way; the way treasure hunting pulls me. Treasures for me include leftovers of a bygone life and age. Pieces that embody and reflect the last days or years, those pieces needed or desired and kept, then frozen in time when the guardian passed. This little box at first glance was nothing much. An old but intact balsa wood box with bright red Coronitas seals inside and out.
The latch was tacked in with tiny brass nails, needing only a fingernail to flip the top of it from the bottom. There it was. Nothing. Or what looked like nothing but bits of a life tossed in that box; bits that mattered, bits that were used. Bits that wanted to be kept in her bedside table. In the midst of it all; paperclips, a sharp pencil with a tiny notepad, a fountain pen, miscellaneous buttons, an old rubber eraser and other pieces, was one more thing incongruous to the rest.
Madonna & Child
Here in her go-to office supplies, sewing kit and keepsakes box, lay a tiny, rusted metal container. The scalloped lid fit tightly over the base. It was no more than an inch long, and a quarter inch in diameter.
Madonna & Child
Strangely enough it reminded me of a bullet. I took the lid off. It wasn’t hard or stuck; it was simply in place, smooth with wear, a thousand openings had before my own.
There inside of the same rusted metal, the same color as the casing, stood the Madonna. A tiny statue of Her.
Madonna & Child
I lifted it out, held it in my hand, and here, the story opened. I may as well have just walked through the grand wooden doors of Hildegaard’s Abbey on the Rhine where the drone of medieval chants fills the air. It echoed song and prayer. It echoed the War and having been tucked in a soldier’s pocket every day so he was kept safe through the long, long nights of fear and hope. It echoed last wishes and coming home. And somehow, in the midst of all that, it found its way into this box, kept by her bedside, until it came to me. In the midst of an ordinary life gone and a go-to box of bits, here stood the Madonna.
Suffice it to say, I always open the lid.
