Finding Memories

Spring is here even if I still have a foot of snow just off the back deck. Spring makes me want to clean all the corners and forgotten areas in the house. Earlier this week, I cleaned my dresser.

My dresser has a drawer for 'stuff'. I put the word in quotations because it isn't just ordinary stuff. This is stuff that has no where else to go but is filled with memories, things like my first communion prayer book, now somewhat tattered. Inside is the page where my younger sister once wrote her name, as small children will, when they are looking at the cool things big sisters keep.

Stuff like the obi, given to me by a a Japanese lady who lived across the back alley in a small southern Alberta town. She, with her Japanese city background, used to talk about how it was so quiet that she could not sleep. I, with my prairie girl farm background, used to talk about how with all the noises of the town, I could not sleep. She quilted, I cross stitched and somehow speaking barely a word of each others languages, we became friends. She came visiting with a very, very good Japanese English dictionary, and we would sit and drink tea, and converse through the pages of the book, with the actions of our hands to the giggles of our little boys.

I came across things like this. This is a handmade box my Grandmother gave me for Christmas a long time ago.

Back in the days before email, before letters were typed and printed and back before long distance was cheap, women wrote cards and letters regularly. They wrote for special occasions and for none at all. The perfect gift for Grandmas was a fancy box full of pretty paper with matching envelopes and sometimes a matching pen. Grandmas would keep boxes of all occasion cards on hand because you just never know who might really like that pretty card with a note inside from you.

Grandma saved all these things, all the cards, the gift wrapping, the ribbons from everything she would receive through the year. When she had enough she would sit down and make things with the bits and pieces. The basic construction of the box is a layer of thin cardboard (cereal boxes, no doubt) then two layers of fancy paper and then a layer of card weight plastic.

Fastened to the fancy paper are little flowers cut from cards, and carefully centred on each side. Each panel of roses is different but all coordinate with the rose and fan on the top. Once each panel was assembled, holes were punched around the edges and crocheted shells were worked into each hole. The crochet not only held the parts together, but also joined panels to each other to form the box. The lid was edged and with a single stitch (possibly two) crocheted to two corners of the box to keep it in place.

Over the years it has held tiny treasures, like the wrist bands identifying my boys at their birth and my treasured cache of double sided safety razor blades , which are simply vital in the sewing room to take apart the stitches modern day seam rippers cannot penetrate. It has held the flotsam and jetsam of life, like the spare keys to the mail box, and buttons and thread for the mornings my work wear needed a quick repair. Lately it was consigned to the corner of the drawer, stuffed with receipts and bits and pieces of paper I'll never need again. Old, forlorn, a bit forgotten.

Grandma didn't just give me a box made of bits and pieces and left overs. She gave me ties to her place in the world, her way of making do when life was tough, her way of thinking, but most of all, Grandma gave me a legacy of love.

Its going to its new home in my study, in a place of honour among the pictures of those I love best.