“Dis-Carding”

I spent the better part of last Saturday cleaning up and out the upstairs guest rooms.  Dave was away at a Cursillo weekend and I had the house to myself.  The catalyst for this need to clean was an overnight visit from friends, although I’ve wanted to tackle the dust and clutter for a long while.

When I clean a room  I start by removing anything that technically doesn’t belong there and then move on to the actual “cleaning”.  Over the past several months, our guest rooms have become repositories for a variety of items that were cleared from the downstairs rooms when they were cleaned.  Since there was nowhere else to move these things to, they had to be addressed individually and a decision had to be made whether or not to find a proper place to keep them, move them into the limbo areas in Dave’s and my offices; the last gasp of hope for anything to remain a part of our household or just  pitch them.

One of the items up for review was a shoebox full of old greeting cards.  I decided to go through them to evaluate each on its own merit, sentimentality, beauty, or humor.  As I went through the pile of cards, I found a birthday card from my Grandma Gray; a Hummel print of a rosy-cheeked little boy   with a fishing pole perched on a stump.  I knew it was from Grandma without even opening it  because of the picture.

Grandma loved Hummel’s and had a collection of the colorful figurines displayed on her bay windowsill. From an early age we learned we were only to look at them, never touch them. The card in my hand was one that accompanied a gift of one of those figurines on my fiftieth birthday – an age when I was finally old enough to touch one.

I know not many of us are lucky enough to still have their grandmothers still with them when they celebrate their fiftieth birthdays.  I was blessed to have mine not only still living; but truly alive.  Although her body and memory were failing, the important bits of her personality that made her the unique warm, funny and faith filled woman  with a bright twinkle in her blue eyes, remained with her until the end.

I loved to phone her everyone once in a while, just to hear her voice and hear her call me darling in her special way that sounded like a song.  I didn’t realize how much I missed her until I opened the card and saw her signature and felt my eyes fill with tears. 

It’s times like these that I’m glad I’m not so systematic in clearing out cards at the end of a birthday or holiday.  If I’d thrown this card out eleven years ago, I wouldn’t have had the opportunity to visit with my Grandma and revisit how much I loved her and she loved me.