I was going through some storage boxes. I was looking for one of my mom’s old bird books, which I did not find, but I stumbled across some of her other old books. When my Dad was moving out of his house, we sorted through a bunch of her stuff and divided it among the children and grandchildren. This box has some of those things in it. In the high emotion of those sorting days, we did not have the time to properly catalog or fully explore each item and I had forgotten about most of them.
I found a number of craft projects that I had made my mom and that she had protected and preserved through time. Most were rough and rudimentary, not worth keeping if they were evaluated on the art scale, but were filled with love, so they made the cut into her collection. I found a few of which I was actually proud. I found several of my mother’s oldest books. They were fragile and had a long lived-in look.
One was a Shirley Temple activity book. Another was a beautifully illustrated version of Peter Pan. My favorite was a book of prayers given to her by my grandfather, Pop. He gave it to her on Christmas 1937. She was six. I don’t ever remember seeing the book. I opened it and saw the handwriting. It has to be from my Pop. I don’t ever remember seeing anything he wrote. Pop was born in 1886. It’s hard to imagine when I knew him as a little child how much he had seen in his life. I love that the oldest gift I have from my grandfather is the gift of prayer.
Next to Pop’s inscription is scrawled the word, “Daddy.” It’s the earliest writing sample I have of my mother. My mother, adored her father. There were some painful moments in their relationship, but she still loved him fully. I just stared at her words in the book for a long time.
I read each page slowly and was thinking about my mom learning to read and thinking about Pop reading the words aloud to her. There were a couple of pages where my mother had traced the pictures with a pencil - normally I would be upset with someone writing in a book like that, but it made her feel so close.
One of the prayers seemed so like my mom. Maybe it stuck deeply inside of her and even helped shape who she became. It made me pray and thank God for the over 130 years of faith and love in my family that I could see, just in that one little book of prayers.