Treasures

Sunday night at 10 pm, Daniel and I were sitting on the couch watching the series finale of Battlestar Galactica (pretty good, by the way), when a knock came on the door. A friendly kind of knock. It's always a little unnerving when someone knocks that late, but Daniel opened the door cautiously to see what the stranger wanted. There stood a middle-aged man wearing a bseball cap. He'd had a few too many drinks, evident from his slurred speech and strange behavior. But he wasn't threatening. He told us this had been his grandparents' house. After a friendly interrogation to make sure he wasn't making it up, he told us that he just wanted to see the shower in the basement because he'd left a hotwheels up on the cement rafters and he wanted to see if it was still there. Straange. He'd left lots of things around the house, but of course, when we got it (sold by the owners' estate) there hadn't been anything left behind. (although we did find two very old picture books under the floor boards upstairs, adn the grandson assured us that there were hotwheels up there too).
It got me to thinking, though, about how kids treasure things differently than adults do. When I was a kid, if I had a treasure, I often would hide it. Or put in a place for safe keeping. One time I spent about a week working at cutting up a golf ball with a hack saw so I could see what was inside. I cracked it open like an egg and found an endless ball of rubber bands. I stuck all of the pieces in an egg carton and hid it behind a bush out by the shop. I think my brothers found it anyway.
I can still show you the hiding places at my parents' house. Probably, if I could still crawl into that one crawl space, we would find some of those treasure that, as I had grown, were left forgotten, waiting to be found by some curious children in the future.
I had this pringles can decorated to look like a nutcracker. We made them in forth grade. I used it to store all of my "treasures", which was an actual collection of things I'd found. Nothing special AT ALL. Literally, things I'd found lying on the bus floors or buried in the pea gravel on the playground. This plastic ring with an Egyptian mummy, a keychain clamp, a polished rock, things like that. Stupid things. But they were mine and I treasured them.
Now that I'm grown, the things I treasure aren't so much tangible things. They're people, of course, and relationships. They're memories and letters and photographs mostly. I can't really store them in a Pringles can, but I don't want to forget them. Which is why I've kept around notebooks full of stupid stories from middle school, journals and photo albums. I remember now, but I might not in twenty years.
What about you? What are your treasures? What do you do to keep them close to you?