My mother owned a long narrow cedar trunk that looked to me, when I was a little girl, like a coffin. It was at the end of her bed and my mother would pile quilts on the coffin, covering its surface. If the quilts were spread over a bed, I would see that the wood was carved with flowered panels. Among these flowers sat a small copper lock, cool as a wasp, securing my mother’s box from the destructive forces of curious children like me.
Eventually, I found a way to break into the trunk, but when I saw the contents, I couldn’t understand why my mother had locked it to begin with. It was filled with the most mundane things imaginable: A stack of white embroidered napkins, china cups and plates with silver at the edges, a cut crystal candy bowl, an album that contained mementos of me, my sister, and my brother: locks of hair, scraps of baby blankets, inked baby footprints. 
The air was musty inside the trunk, as if I’d entered the closed darkness of a cellar. I’d expected to find bars of gold bullion, jeweled cups, or at least a birthday present hidden among the tissue paper. Disappointed, I closed the lid and left it alone.
The next time I paid attention to my mother’s wooden trunk was an evening in December, many years later, when I was home from college. It was dark outside, and snow had covered over the driveway. My mother and I were wrapping Christmas presents together in her bedroom and she opened the wooden trunk, looking for some special ribbon she’d tucked away. I recognized the smell of cedar and dust, the scents I hadn’t known how to name as a child. Now, I could identify the climbing flowers—they were lilies—and I understood that the trunk didn’t resemble a coffin at all. Looking inside as an adult, I saw the contents of the trunk had changed—instead of linens and china cups, there were stacks of report cards, my brother’s high school letter jacket, a trophy my sister had won playing basketball, a watercolor I’d painted in eleventh grade, every one of our school portraits from kindergarten through graduation preserved in slips of plastic. Every moment of glory her kids had experienced she’d kept in the trunk.
“Where did you get this,” I asked her, running a finger over the varnished edge of the trunk. “You’ve had it forever.”
“Haven’t I told you about my hope chest before?” she asked.
I must have made a strange face—the kind of face a young woman home from college makes at her mother when the subject wavers toward certain subjects.
“Hope chest?” I asked. “Hope for what?”
“You know,” she said, her face turning slightly pink, as if she anticipated my criticism before it came. “Marriage. Kids. Life.”
I gave her a look that said: You’ve go to be kidding.
“Well, these kinds of things were much more common when I was young!” Mom was ready to defend herself against me, something she had to do with some frequency. I was always looking to define myself against her, always searching for the ways that we were different, making her into 
a mirror I could fracture, even if it cut us both in the process.
Mom said, “I worked at The Elite candy shop making caramels on the weekends and saved up for it. After I’d bought it, I filled it with all the things I wanted to have when I was married—pretty sheets and tablecloths and silver, that kind of thing. I bought the dishes piece by piece, a cup here, a saucer there, until I had the entire set. It’s a shame: The pattern was discontinued. If I break something, I can’t replace it.” She met my eyes. “Don’t look at me that way!”
“It’s like you grew up in Victorian England,” I said, thinking myself much more modern, more worldly, free of my mother’s preconceptions about what it meant to be a woman.
“It wasn’t so long ago that girls did things like that,” she replied, closing the lid of the hope chest softly, as if closing the cover of a book. “If you were born in the fifties, you might have had a hope chest too.”
It wasn’t until later, when I was working so hard to save my marriage with The Magician, that I understood that I had a hope chest of my own. Not of wood, not locked up and hidden under stacks of quilts, but a hope chest nonetheless, one filled with a collection of ideas about love and marriage and kids and work and happiness. Examining my hope chest, I found that the ideas I’d amassed weren’t so different from my mother’s. Despite all of my posturing about being a modern woman, despite my rebellious secret first marriage, I wanted a family of my own. Each preconceived notion about love, each hope and expectation about my family, had ended up inside my own hope chest wrapped, like so many crystal bowls, in tissue.
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To reach Dani, email DaniTrueRomantic@gmail.com.
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Rumpus original art by Claire Stringer.
Rumpus original logo art by Max Winter.