It was not tools. I set it down on my tailgate and I backed up a step and looked up and down my own street to see was anybody watching me, because for one second the mind goes right where it goes. And then I looked closer, and I felt like a fool, and then I felt like crying, because it was books. Hand-made books, and photographs, and letters, and folder after folder, all of it one man whole life work, and that work was his family.
It was a genealogy. An entire family history, decades in the making, done by hand. This man, whoever he was, had spent what must have been thirty years tracing his people back, generation on generation, writing to distant cousins, collecting up old photographs, copying names off gravestones, until he had built the whole tree of his family, hundreds of souls across two hundred years, bound up careful in books he made himself.
And he never got to finish it. Or never got to give it. The last entries were recent, and then they just stopped, and the unit went unpaid, and I knew in my gut what that meant. Something took him, sudden, right in the middle of his life work, with the whole of it sitting in a rented unit out on Route 66, three feet from a box of Christmas ornaments he had wrapped one at a time.
There was a letter, tucked in the front of the very first book, and it was addressed to his family, all of them, the ones living and the ones not yet born. I made this for you. So that you would know where you come from, and who came before you, and what they lived through to get you here. A person ought to know their people. We are not just ourselves. We are everybody who ever loved their way down the line to us. Keep this. Add to it. Do not ever let the family forget itself.
I could not sell that. A man does not sell another man family. So I did the only thing that felt right, which was track them down, the family in those books, and there were a whole lot of them, scattered all over the country, and near none of them had any idea this man had been doing this for thirty years.
I got the whole of it to his closest people, his sister and his grown kids. And I want you to know, when they finally understood what it was, what he had spent the back half of his life quietly building for every one of them, it was like handing them back a piece of the man himself. His sister held those hand-made books and said now the family would never be lost, that her brother had made sure of it, that he had reached forward past his own death to hold the whole family together.
I paid sixty dollars for a storage unit figuring to flip it for a hundred. What I found was a man love letter to everybody he was ever kin to, and I got to be the one who carried it home to them. Some units you win. That one, I believe, won me.