Free Shattering the Myth by Zane

looked exactly like they did when I was a child.
    They drove me back to the big country manor where my mother and her three sisters grew up. Once I threw my bags in the bedroom where I would be staying, the one that belonged to my mother as a child, I went down to the kitchen to help Grandma stuff the turkey and bake pies for dinner the next day.
    Thanksgiving dinner was going to be great because I would get to see my aunts, their husbands, and all of my cousins. My parents were traveling in Europe, so they were going to have to miss it.
    After we finished preparing everything, my grandparents and I sat in the living room by the fire and talked about the good old days. Grandpa surprised me by having a pizza delivered. I had never even pictured my grandparents eating somethingthat wasn’t homemade, much less pizza. Times had really, really changed. There was no denying that.
    One thing had remained the same, however, and that was how early they went to bed every night. By 9 P.M ., they were both calling the hogs, since they got up around 5 A.M . every morning. They had retired years before but still rose early by force of habit.
    I flipped through the channels of the old floor-model television in the living room, the only television in the entire house. They didn’t have cable. There were a few sitcoms on, but none of them interested me. I looked through the bookcase in my grandpa’s study, hoping to find something interesting to read. All his books were about carpentry, farming, flyfishing, landscaping, home repair, and things of that nature, so I quickly gave up on the idea.
    I quietly went upstairs to my mother’s bedroom, undressed, put on a white cotton nightgown, and tried to go ahead and fall asleep. There was no freaking way that was happening, because it was way too early for me.
    I was going to hang my garment bag up in her closet, but the closet was packed to the brim with clothing that belonged to her as a teenager. I slipped on my bedroom shoes and went to check and see if there was some space for it in the hallway closet.
    I opened the walk-in closet in the hall and found some space for my bag. The closet had a door in the rear of it that led to the attic. I was mad bored, and since there was nothing to watch on television and nothing to read, I elected to explore the attic instead.
    I nudged open the door to the attic stairs, which was hard to open and squeaky, being that no one had been up there in years. After ascending the stairs and finding the pull string for the lightbulb, I was surprised to see there were very few spiderwebsaround. However, there was a lot of dust, and I almost turned around in fear my allergies would start acting up.
    I was reaching for the string to turn off the light when I noticed an old hope chest in a corner by the window seat. Normally, I am not a nosy person, but something drew me to the chest like a magnet. Besides, my whole point in going up there in the first place was to meddle through family heirlooms and mementos anyway.
    I tried to open the chest, but there was a lock on it and the key was nowhere in sight. I shifted through a couple of boxes filled with clothing, cheerleader pom-poms and batons, year-books belonging to my mother and her sisters, and all the usual things until I found an old rusty screwdriver.
    I used the flat head of the screwdriver to bust the lock on the chest. It didn’t take much effort, since the lock was flimsy after so much time. I sat down on the window seat and started pulling things out. There were several photographs of my grandparents when they were younger, pictures of their wedding, pictures of my mother and aunts as children and teenagers, pictures of my great-grandparents and other family members. There were some old lace handkerchiefs, a couple of hand-knitted cardigans, and even a poodle skirt.
    Looking at all the old things made me crack up laughing. I couldn’t even relate to times like those. For me, growing up