Over the last two days I’ve driven to St. Louis and back with a side trip to Quincy, Illinois, a trip of more than 700 miles overall. While in St. Louis I did some more organizing, picked up a load of furniture and other items that had been my mother’s, and visited my mother’s grave.
As I think I’ve said before the amount of paperwork I’ve had to sort through has been daunting. Hundreds of pounds of cancelled checks, tax forms, paid bills, household expense journals, and so on and so on. This trip I sorted through my mother’s desk which had been my father’s desk in his law office and which will now be my desk. Tucked among the forty year old onion skin and old ledgers was an unexpected treasure.
In a an old spiral-bound notebook there was a single page, written more than 50 years ago, in my Grandmother Esther Schuler’s handwriting. I’ve reproduced the image of the page. Here’s the part that struck me:
A very wonderful birthday spent with David who is a marvelous grandson. He entertained me every minute of the time I spent at Colleen’s after welcoming me at the door with the sweetest smile imagineable. I shall always remember this day as a very bright time in my life.
A year later she was dead.
I never knew three of my grandparents. They had all died before I was born. My sole surviving grandparent was my father’s mother. Although he visited her regularly, once or twice a week, our relationship with her was strained and I don’t believe I met her more than two or three times. I remember the events she described in her journal. It was the only time she visited our home.
Now for the first time in my life all these years later I have some evidence that she actually cared for me a little. It’s not much but it’s all that I have.
“It’s not much but it’s all that I have”
Such are the small, tiny gifts we receive throughout our lives that give us hope, smiles, memories, sustenance and spirit!