Benutzer:TerrieHoleman2
I came to London as a boy in ’48. That crossing set a rhythm inside me. One memory that refuses to loosen: a trunk carries a life inside it.
On the voyage that bent time in half, we packed a life into one chest. hard like iron yet carrying soft stories inside. The latches gripped like teeth.
In the age of plastic, wooden storage trunk memory is cheap, but those trunks were built for storms. Each bruise on the skin was a chapter. But look at the docks, the stacks of trunks.
I kept my trunk in the corner like a low drum, and it stayed with me. A toy car that squeaked: the trunk turned clutter into story.
Years later, another memory took hold. Every year the circus rolled in like a quick storm, and bright bills slapped onto old brick boasted elephants, fire eaters, trapeze artists, and clowns. Anticipation walked ahead of the drums. Crews shouted across the field, and the smell of sawdust hung in the air. It felt like ordinary life had slipped a gear.
I met a trunk that smelled faintly of greasepaint, and I just stared. A clown stared back, inverted and bold, grin part-faded. It wasn’t decoration. It carried the hush of a different age. Not just timber and iron, but a fragment of the travelling circus.
My workspace smells of oil, wood, and patient repairs. I imagine it wedged between crates, crammed with shoes, wigs, and greasepaint, waiting for the show to begin. Each bruise and nick suggest roads and rain and rough travel. You can almost hear the locks click.
And then a screen repeated the past. One evening I found an ArtStation design, and it showed a clown suitcase storage trunk that matched mine. It felt like a new stitch pulling old cloth. The skew of the grin, the way colour sank into wood matched line for line. I half-believed the artist had stood where I stood. Light to fibre, eye to hand: the echo landed in the same room.
We treat trunks like containers, yet once they moved whole families. They were built heavy and honest. Timber sides, iron straps, deep latches. Some wore brass corners or painted letters. Lift the lid and you meet a story, you meet a journey. Set it down and the floor remembers too.
I watch memory get a new job as furniture. Hide vinyl and blankets and winter coats. Some call it distressed, but I call it still beating. A trunk keeps its place in the room. If you pass a market and the lid winks, don’t call it junk. Choose the chest that already knows your name, and watch it stand another fifty years.
Sometimes I set the Windrush trunk beside the circus trunk. One knew fog horns. I run a cloth across both lids. They don’t even sit in the same time, but together they hum low. That’s how story learns to stand: in paint.
I’ve earned my living with things that outlast moods. Sometimes I think memory is contagious. When I name the dents, I’m reading the minutes of a meeting. Windrush to ringmaster, the stitch looks rough but it will not part.
So I let them live in my rooms, and I feel the room answer. Timber settles. Each time I walk by, that inverted grin finds me, as if waiting for the drumroll. And when the window fogs and clears, I think I hear my trunk breathe, and I nod to the lids like old friends: keep it safe, keep it near, keep it true.
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