Sipping our Cappuccinos, we discussed the many craft projects we still had to do.
Jenny, my friend and co-accomplice of many years of scrapbooking, embroidery, pottery (the list goes on and on…) had once, laughingly but emphatically announced to me as we discussed the projects we still had to do, “Sylvia, I’m just letting you know now, when you die, do not leave all your craft stuff to me!”
Have you ever thought about that?
The stuff that we accumulate because, just maybe, perhaps, one day we might need it…?
Now, a number of years later, here we sat…it was time to pack up my mom’s colourful life.
As all of the girls in our family gathered together to sort through the tangible representations of the things that had mattered in my mother’s life, there were endless exclamations of “Oh, do you remember when…”, “she was wearing this…”, “she was teaching me how to flip pancakes…”, followed by “what on earth is this…?” “Does anybody know what this is?”
I was going through all the documents, files and official looking papers when a stack of letters fell out of one of the files I was carrying…
Bending down to pick them up…I realized that what I held in my hand were love letters from my father to my mother starting in 1950. My mom had always told us about his romantic love letters and now here I stood holding his heart in my hands…
The opportunity to be an invisible bystander of a great love story…
My mother kept these letters and read and reread these expressions of his love right to the end of her life.
How very precious…
It made me think of our rushed society with all of our social media and our one line messaging…have we lost the ability to truly communicate?
Do we really even know how to articulate in words what our loved ones mean to us?
Thanks Dad, I am looking forward to reading those letters…
