Inside the box, there was a piece of yellowed paper with careful cursive writing, a small statute of a horse covered in dirt, and oddly shaped papers, some of which I realized were paper dolls. There were also some faded labels: for pear soap, a Hershey's candy bar, and a box of Cracker Jacks, the front page of a newspaper.
I felt excited holding these things, but confused. "What is that?" said my brother, grabbing it away from me for a closer look. He threw down the box with disgust. I suppose he was hoping we had found some sort of buried treasure of coins and jewels. History did not interest him -- he liked to find dead mice, crushed bugs, or strange-looking weeds. But I was fascinated. I resisted the impulse to bury it and keep it for myself, a secret, and showed it to my mother.
"It's a time capsule," said my mother. "It must be, oh, from the 1940s. Yes, you see this yellow piece of paper -- this is a ration coupon for meat." My brother...
"Sometimes it has been a fad, to create time capsules and bury them. Look, these paper dolls are from the 1940s and 1950s. I recognize them from watching movies with your grandmother."
"Should we keep the box?" I asked. My mother said it was not really ours, and tried to find the original owner of the house. When she could not locate her -- or him -- she donated the artifacts to a local museum. My brother soon forgot about the box and the buried treasure. But sometimes I think about it from time to time: I have never made a time capsule, but I am not sure what I would like to save, to preserve for future generations of explorers. I often wonder about the things that are so precious to me, and ask myself if they will look equally as valuable, after spending many years beneath the ground, or if they will be regarded with the same careless disgust as my brother did the small treasures of girlhood of that forgotten woman.
