The gifts from my parents’ attic started out intriguing enough. At Christmas, a box landed in my living room filled with my 8th-grade diaries (“I have a crush on Mike Defenbach!”), my high school year books (voted most likely to marry a politician and throw dinner parties), and my prom picture with Eric Doyle (dreamy.)

Despite my mother’s hopes that the subsequent boxes would inspire the same kind of awe, the contents have become increasingly bizarre. Clearly, my parents who are in their 70s are saints to have stored some of this stuff for the past three decades. And by rights, I should have cleared out my old high school uniform skirts eons ago. Failing to do so, however, my mother has been leaving me little packages over the past several weeks: lime green patent leather shoes with disintegrating soles from the ’70s and, of all things, a white velcro leg brace from an injury I can’t remember. Then came this last batch. My mom called first.

“Remember the rug in your old bathroom?” my mom asked. “That bright yellow, shag carpet?”

I remembered it. My mom had cut that rug out of a larger piece to fit wall-to-wall around the sink and toilet. But it wasn’t the rug itself she found. It was the extra remnant.

“It’s in perfect condition,” she said. “I’ll drop it by.”

Crazy, I thought, that she still had such a thing. But I certainly couldn’t reject it outright. Besides, the 1970s style is coming back, right? Maybe I could cut a swatch of it for the kids’ gray-tiled bathroom. A splash of sunny yellow, just like my mom wanted for my sister and me.

When I came home, the rug remnant sat on the living room floor, wrapped in brown paper. Intrigued, I lifted a corner of the thin, crackling paper and caught a glimpse of the familiar smiley face “Have-a-Nice-Day” yellow. But when I pulled on the carpet, my wave of nostalgia was quickly overpowered by a tsunami of billowing dust and disintegrating yellowness.

Holding my breath, I dragged the whole cumbersome carcass to my screened porch and there it sits in its crackle wrap until I … decide what to do with it.

But there was another basket of left-overs from my mother’s attic still in the living room. It contained a plastic bag with two dozen spools of thread, a Simplicity pattern for a dress I wore as a “Jet” in West Side Story and an angel-faced nightlight, that still works. There was one more thing:  a circa 1975 inflatable bathtub pillow.

My daughter washed it off, blew it up, and suctioned it to the tub. Then I took a nice hot bath, to wash off the yellow dust. Thanks Mom.

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My husband never liked this old painting. When I asked him what it was, exactly, that he didn't like about it, he said this:

"Where shall I begin? Poor likeness. Homely subject. Poor execution. Lack of proportion."

Maybe I shouldn't have asked. I love this vintage oil painting of an old woman sitting in the window with her kitchen bowl. I bought the portrait a few years ago in a funky antique shop on Lighthouse Drive in Monterey, not far from Cannery Row. I'm sure she had hung on the wall of this shop for years, watching as customer after customer walked by with barely a glance. Most people probably saw her as my husband does — homely and poorly executed.

"Look at that big hand!" one of my friends said the first time she saw her. I hadn't even noticed.

But I love her. I imagine her as a worker in the sardine factories in the 1920s and '30s, who comes home after a long day to make dinner for her family. She takes just a moment to sit in the kitchen window. I like that she wears a necklace.

She usually hangs above the brick fireplace on my screened porch — a summer gathering place for friends and family. But I brought her inside for the winter. She's hanging in my entry hall, hidden when the front door opens wide so my husband hasn't objected too much. Besides, he knows that no matter what anybody says, I'm keeping her. And when the weather warms up, she's going outside again, back to her place of prominence.