One of the first things I learned in this life was that there was treasure to be found all around me. All I had to do was look closely enough and I would never be without a sense of wonder.
These treasures weren’t big, like a ship filled with gold or even a stash of cash long forgotten in an attic. Oh, I looked for those, too. When I was about four, one of my favorite pastimes was digging.
“Krissy’s digging for treasure again,” my mother would report as I dug deeper and deeper in the soft soil of our small backyard.
She conveniently forgot to mention that she had placed the idea in my head that if I found treasure, a lot of our troubles would be over.
“All we have to do is find something—something valuable—that someone else has forgotten about, and we can get away!” she’d hiss in a conspiring tone into my ear, cigarette smoke puffing from her lips.
I was only three when she started that venue. I was three and she was nearly thirty, and she believed that a monetary treasure would save us. I didn’t, but I did believe that we’d be better off if we could somehow escape from my father. So, I dug. And dug.
One day, I dug a hole so deep that I couldn’t get out. My father had to rescue me when he got home from work.
“What were you doing?” he asked as he pulled me out.
“Looking for treasure,” I said.
That created a space for an hour-long litany about how there couldn’t possibly be treasure in our tiny back yard in the nowhere-town of Butler New Jersey.
“If there was anything valuable in this place,” my father concluded as I picked dried dirt from the creases in my palms, “we wouldn’t have been able to buy it, that’s for sure.”
But my mother kept hoping for treasure—something to show her family that she could take care of herself, enough to escape my father’s old-world authoritarianism.
I learned something different. I learned that treasure has more to do with the heart than with the pocket book. Though I would have dearly loved to escape my father, even if it meant being with my mother, who had her cruel moments but was far too narcissistic to be concerned with discipline if she had something better to do, especially something fun like shopping for a new dress or attending a party.
I learned the day I spied the crystalline shed skin of a tiny fly that true treasure warms the soul. That knowledge hit me so hard the first time I felt the flutter of life deep inside of me that my knees buckled. I sat on the grass and stared at the fly skeleton, shining in the sun, for so long that my mother decided I’d taken sick and sent me to bed.
But from that time on, punishment, misunderstanding and even scapegoating had far less effect on me. Each time a blow landed, each time I was sent to bed without dinner, each time I was blamed for someone else’s unhappiness, the small treasures I’d discovered came with me and kept me warm.
