It’s not much to look at.

A wooden box with a hinged lid, maybe four feet in length, badly weathered and aged, sitting at the edge of the open lanai of the small house in Kahala where my parents lived from the early 1940s until my father’s death in October. My mother is still living there, with assistance from my sister, Bonnie.

I remember this box in a different spot on the lanai when I was a kid. That was a while ago. At that time, it stored stuff. All kinds of stuff. Toys. Baseball mitts. Bats. Balls for various sports. A big reel of kite string, probably half a mile’s worth or more. Bike supplies. Tools. You name it, and it was probably stored in there somewhere.

Yesterday it was full of other kinds of junk, markers of my dad’s extended life. Miscellaneous used parts from his boat, discarded plumbing fixtures, some kind of filter used on ice machines, bottles and cans filled with old screws, nails, nuts and bolts, washers, remnants of repairs past. And there were some papers, covered with dirt and showing signs of old water damage. Several folders from a lawsuit in the 1970s over disputed kitchen equipment not paid for. Records of other investments closed out decades ago. A few letters from family, friends, business associates. Vintage tools, some surely dating back to his father. A pair of large cast iron ice tongs. A planer of some kind, wooden handles well worn.

My mother apparently wants to get rid of the old box. She sees it simply as clutter.

But Bonnie says it’s not just a wooden box. It is the original trunk that accompanied my dad when he arrived at the dock in Honolulu on the Lurline on May 1, 1939 at age 25. The trunk was stuffed in the back of a brand new Dodge Club Coupe, Squadron Green, along with a couple of surfboards. It was, Bonnie recalls, made for my dad by his father, who worked as a craftsman in the California shipyards after coming to the U.S. from Scotland.

I don’t have any independent recollection of hearing my father talk about this trunk, although his later descriptions of arriving in the islands all mention a trunk filled with his possessions, and this trunk is certainly the right vintage. It’s odd, feeling the wood, examining the workmanship, absorbing random impressions of this time-traveling trunk that outlasted my dad’s nearly 97 long years.

I never knew my grandfather, who died in California when I was less than a year old, so the trunk creates a unique sort of hands-on link to the past.

We didn’t do anything yesterday to clean it up. We did dump a lot of the odds and ends that were in it, and packed those dirty files into two boxes for further review and a “dump or save” decision.

I think the trunk is safe for now, but we’ll just have to see what happens next.