Eight years ago, a man who was not Sandra A. Miller’s husband invited her on an armchair treasure hunt—a search for $10,000 worth of gold coins buried in New York City, of all places. When she said she’d go, her world was upended.
At the time Sandra was helping her ailing mother to die and her almost-teenage children to fly, but her biggest challenge was the confusion she felt about entering middle age and the shame of craving something more when she had so much already: a devoted husband, a decent career, and a community of close friends who knew how to rock a potluck. But isn’t that how life is sometimes? We ache for something we can’t even name, but we don’t know what to do about it? Or we do, but we don’t do it.
In Sandra’s case, that treasure hunt for gold coins stirred her longing heart into action.
In a very real way, she’d 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 often-unhappy childhood in a Connecticut factory town, she found deeper meaning, and a good deal of hope, in these objects that she collected in a broken shoebox: my trove.
As an adult facing the loss of her mother who was at once cold, difficult, and wildly funny, Sandra found herself, as she so often did as a little girl, pressed against a wall of her own longing. Her search for gold, which soon became an obsession, forced me to dredge up painful pieces of her past and confront the true source of her sorrow. Soon she was wandering down dark paths she otherwise would never have taken, hoping to discover what she’d been looking for all those years—and putting everything at risk for a treasure hunt.
Valeria interviews Sandra A. Miller — the author of Trove: A Woman’s Search for Truth and Buried Treasure,. Her essays and articles have appeared in over one hundred publications, including Modern Bride, The Boston Globe Magazine, The Christian Science Monitor, The Washington Post, and Glamour. One of her essays was turned into a short film called “Wait” starring Kerry Washington. Sandra lives in the Boston area, teaches writing at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. She also leads spirit-filled writing workshops in person and online.
— This podcast is a quest for well-being, a quest for a meaningful life to the exploration of fundamental truths, enlightening ideas, insights on physical, mental, and spiritual health. The inspiration is Love. The aspiration is to awaken new ways of thinking that can lead us to a new way of being, being well.
