Homemade Gifts and Memories

Memory lane

We didn't know she had saved them. Homemade Mother's Day cards, poems celebrating the first day of spring, letters to Santa. My mother had saved every homemade card, every drawing my sister and I had given her. She even pressed and dried our occasional gifts of wildflowers. She had kept everything. Our gifts were bound in red lace in the bottom drawer, next to her neatly folded sweaters.

A wonderful discovery
We found them a few weeks after my dad died. (My mother had died ten years earlier.) We were cleaning our childhood home and had chosen to start in my parents' bedroom. He'd kept their bedroom the same all these years, never touching any of her belongings. Half-empty perfume bottles on her dresser, Sunday "church clothes" in her closet — a life frozen in time.

We sat on the bedroom floor, untied the red lace, and recalled my mom's responses to each of these gifts. I was 30, married, and the father of a two-year-old child. My sister was 20. But in that moment, we were again Thelma's little kids.

She had always shown delight reading each misspelled birthday card. Smiled like an anxious schoolgirl, eyes closed, as we presented her with our annual "surprise" May Day bouquet of freshly-picked violets. She always treated our gifts of refrigerator art like museum masterpieces.

Perhaps I should not have been surprised to find these hidden treasures. As a child, playing in the attic, I had accidentally discovered an old wooden box. It contained cards and love letters from my father, written to my mother while he fought in England and Germany during World War II. I had known my father as a large, powerful man, not given to outward displays of affection. My mother knew otherwise and had preserved his loving words. As she had preserved ours.

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