Longing for Treasure
By Sandra A. Miller
Sometimes I wanted to leave, but I couldn’t. There were always brown bag lunches to prepare and a pile of papers to grade, kids to drive to music lessons and weekends crammed with soccer games—so many soccer games. I couldn’t even tell where my own needs began and ended.
I read Eat Pray Love and thought, I’ll have what she’s having, but I couldn’t have that because I chose different verbs: Wed Procreate Stress. It was another kind of adventure, full of small blessings that for years I struggled to count.
I was also a writer, just starting to work on a memoir, Trove, about treasure hunting—both real and metaphorical. Since I was little, I had always found things on the ground—broken bits of jewelry, coins, hair clips—that I thought of as clues pointing me to my own magical treasure hidden somewhere in the world. I knew I had a story to tell about a woman in mid-life bursting with longing, but still hunting clues like a child.
On the days I wasn’t’ teaching or full-time mothering, I made myself write, but sometimes a folded pile of laundry represented the most quantifiable success in the course of a workday. Still, I couldn’t let go of the idea. Women. Mid-life. A treasure hunt.
I wasn’t alone, it seemed. All of my middle-aged friends were looking for their treasure, too.
Then one day my friend David invited me to go on a real treasure hunt for 10,000 dollars in gold coins buried in New York City. It felt like a calling, a chance to finally find what I’d been looking for: an answer to that longing I couldn’t even name.
Maybe I knew that digging in the New York dirt with David would give me the book I’d been trying to write about treasure hunting in the physical world, and how that inspired a deeper search for the things I lacked as a child: a connection to my parents, a feeling of fullness.
The words treasure and thesaurus derived from the same Greek word: thesauros, meaning storehouse or trove. Words had always been my treasure. I went from a girl who filled pink diaries with stories of her yearning to a woman who filled cloth journals with every dream she couldn’t quite make come true. I never stopped searching, and I never stopped writing.
When I told my husband Mark about my plan with David, he asked, “A treasure hunt? Why?” It was nearly impossible to explain—even to Mark, my soulmate, my love. It sounded silly to say how crucial this felt, that all my life I’d collected found things in shoeboxes that I called my troves. He knew I had them, but he didn’t know what they meant to me. He didn’t know that those talismanic objects had been my protection against parents who rode roughshod over my yearning.
“It’s only for a day or two,” I told Mark.
When he raised an uncertain eyebrow, I practically stamped my foot. Instead I looked around the cluttered living room and shut my eyes on the detritus of family life. There was an ache in my chest as I remembered how it used to be, how at 23, I emptied my bank account, packed up my red nylon suitcase and headed to New York, then Los Angeles, then Tokyo, then Europe. I loved and worked my way around the world and swore I’d keep going until I found my home.
Finally I did. In Mark’s arms. And when we danced by the light of the moon on our wedding night, I thought this love would cure the longing in my heart. On our first anniversary, I was anchored in a house in the suburbs and was thirteen days away from giving birth. Soon I had a baby covered from head to toe in eczema, the most beautiful soul in the world with the most unsightly, raw abraded skin. It would be years before I slept or wrote or breathed deeply again.
In those early years, I wanted to leave just long enough to remember who I was before motherhood. If only for a few days, I wanted to escape into an adventure, the kind I had all through my twenties when the wind blew me this way and that and I took jobs, not to build my career, but to build my spirit, to hone my craft, and feed the hungry beast of longing.
It was that same hungry beast that made me narrow my eyes and lash out at my husband in anger when he said he’d rather I didn’t go to New York. When he said there were too many things going on for us that weekend.
What he didn’t know was that I had to go.
What he didn’t know was that my life depended on that treasure hunt.
“I am going,” I told him. “I am going to search for treasure.” And maybe, just maybe, I thought, I would find something of what I needed on that journey, something that I’d been looking for my whole life: my parents, some peace, a treasure chest, my book.
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Sandra A. Miller’s recently published memoir, Trove: A Woman’s Search for Truth and Buried Treasure has an online treasure hunt attached to it. Her essays and articles have appeared in over 100 publications including The Christian Science Monitor, Spirituality & Health, and the Boston Sunday Globe Magazine, for which she is a regular correspondent. One of her personal essays was turned into short film called “Wait” starring Kerry Washington. She teaches at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell. You can find out more about her online treasure hunt at SandraAMiller.com or follow her social media:
Twitter @WriterSandraM
Instagram: sandra.a.miller
TROVE: A WOMAN’S SEARCH FOR TRUTH AND BURIED TREASURE
Trove is the story of a woman whose life is upended when she begins an armchair treasure hunt―a search for $10,000 worth of gold coins buried in New York City, of all places―with a man who, as she points out, is not her husband. In this eloquent, hilarious, sharply realized memoir, Sandra A. Miller grapples with the regret and confusion that so often accompanies middle age, and the shame of craving something more when she has so much already.
In a very real way, Miller has spent her life hunting for buried treasure. As a child, she trained herself to find things: dropped hair clips, shiny bits of broken glass, discarded lighters. Looking to escape from her volatile parents and often-unhappy childhood, Miller found deeper meaning, and a good deal of hope, in each of these objects.
Now an adult and facing the loss of her last living parent―her mother who is at once cold, difficult, and wildly funny―Miller finds herself, as she so often did as a little girl, pressed against a wall of her own longing. Her search for gold, which soon becomes an obsession, forces her to dredge up painful pieces of her past, confront the true source of her sorrow, and finally discover what it is she has been looking for all these years.
Category: Contemporary Women Writers, On Writing
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