Giving Thanks

While I was away at college, my stepmother threw away everything I owned, except what I had in my dorm room.  It’s too easy to say it was a wicked thing for a stepmother to do…she was a person who was in a lot of pain, and I’ve told myself many times since that day that if those things were important, I should have taken better care to have them with me.

But “those things” were signed yearbooks, school essays, childhood journals, letters from friends, birthday cards, scrawled poetry, my earliest writings…and it actually gives me a soft ache in my chest just thinking about them.  Perhaps if I still had them, they wouldn’t seem so precious, but I doubt it.

A strange topic for Thanksgiving, but I’ll get to the point. 

I think that losses bring home the importance of things, in a visceral way, a way that sticks.  The thought of losing something is nothing like actually losing it.

So, when a box arrived on my doorstep fairly recently from my stepfather, I took notice.  It was the sum total of my 90-year-old mother’s family history.  Photographs, scrapbooks, notes in fading sepia ink…but the great treasure was two journals, one from each of my grandmothers -- Ethel’s from Evanston, Illinois in 1901, and Bula’s from Fort Dodge, Kansas in 1904.

Grandma Ethel’s is truly disappearing before my eyes, with small pieces of cracked and powdered red leather littering my desk each time I open it to transcribe, but I’m saving it, page by page, on my computer.  Grandma Bula’s holds up better -- I’m saving it, too, by typing the words into a document that goes on the external hard drive for safekeeping.

Ethel and Bula couldn’t possibly have conceived how much their words would mean to a granddaughter who was 9 and 17, respectively, when they died.  Computers and hard drives would be a mystery to the young girls who rode out to “socials” in a horse and buggy, and wondered whether to wear the blue frock with the satin ribbons, or the white shirtwaist with the red stitching.

But those girls had hard lives…expected to begin earning their way at fourteen, be married a few years later, manage a house, raise children, care for their husbands, and somehow keep their dreams alive.  I can read it in every page, and I’m so grateful for their point of view.

They’ve given me back my history.  And to the ache in my chest about my lost writings? They would say, “Feel it.  Move on.  Write some more.”

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