While sorting through some old keepsakes, you find an envelope with your name on it that hasn’t been opened. You recognize the handwriting.
The first person I see each morning when I rise is my grandmother who sleeps in a bed next to mine. I am seven years old.
Grandmother sleeps quietly, peacefully.
I watch her chest rise and fall as I tiptoe to her side of our room. Carefully, still watching her closely, I slide open the top drawer of her dresser where she hides both wintergreen and butterscotch drops. She wouldn’t mind, I tell myself, as I pop a treat into my mouth and return to my bed.
It’s summertime and I hope that she will wake soon so we can go outside and play. Without Grandmother here, there would be little else for me to do.
The candy is sweet, like Grandmother, but also very hard so I roll it around in my mouth with my tongue a few times. It clinks against my teeth and my grandmother smiles. “Is that you, little bug?”
“Yep… are you all awake now, Grandma?”
“Just about, little bug. But let’s snuggle for a little while longer… shall we?”
I jump into her bed and lie my head in the nook of her shoulder; my little leg falls gently over her waist. Inside the cocoon of her warm arms she wraps me tightly. “What are we going to do today?” I ask.
“Oh, I don’t know… I was thinking maybe we could pick some dandelion greens from the back yard a little later on. I’ll cook them up for our dinner tonight.”
My body recoils. “You eeeeat dandelions, Grandma!”
“Why, of course. Do you mean to tell me that you’ve never had cooked dandelion greens before, Mary?”
“Ah, no,” I say as I pull the butterscotch drop from my mouth, examine its current size and slip it back into my mouth. “They sound really yucky.”
“Oh, well, we shall see,” she says as she kisses me on the forehead, rolls her gold wedding band around on her finger and kisses it like she does every morning. “Maybe we should do some writing again a little later on, too. Would you like to do that?”
I smile shyly. “Do you really think I could be a writer one day, Grandma?”
“Well, of course you can… if that’s what you want to be.”
I try to image what it is I want to be when I grow up, but I’m not really sure. “Maybe,” I say as I begin to grind away at my candy with my back teeth.
“You have plenty of time to decide, little bug,” she says, rising from her bed. “For now, let’s just go have some breakfast.”
It’s my twenty-first birthday, April, when I receive a letter from my father telling me that my grandmother has died. The funeral is on Saturday, he writes. We all hope you can make it, Mary. I smile thinking, how could I not?
The morning of Grandmother’s funeral, my father reminds me that his mother-in-law would have been eighty-eight in August, had she not died. My mother is next to us but so ill she no longer knows who I am; not since I was eighteen, in fact. Alzheimer’s. I hold onto her hand and we stand over Grandmother’s grave. Mom has no idea why we are there.
Later, I help my father clean out my grandmother’s things from the same bedroom we shared when I was a child. Her oak dresser is still there, the one she used to store candy treats and other things inside of. I open the top drawer and peek in, hoping to find remnants of butterscotch. Instead, a jewelry box has replaced the space where the candy used to hide.
I begin there.
Inside the wooden box, baubles and beads of mere colored glass sparkle like diamonds, rubies, sapphires and emeralds through my now watery eyes. Each one, like the last, reminding me of her as I fumble through them: earrings shaped like flowers and buttons, pins shaped like birds, necklaces as long as my arm, rings too small for my fingers and, my childhood favorite, a row of little red and black ladybugs strung on a gold chain which stretches across my wrist and fastens into a bracelet.
I sit down on Grandmother’s bed — it’s larger now; our two twin beds long gone — and spin the ladybug bracelet around my wrist and think about dandelions and love. I close my eyes and soon, in my mind’s eye, my Grandmother is sleeping peacefully again close by. I think about how much she meant to me and how I should’ve visited her more often as I return to the dresser.
Just like Grandmother, the next drawer is as orderly and neat as the last. Everything has a place: tubes of peppermint ointment she soothed over her ever-tired, aching joints; delicate, hand-embroidered handkerchiefs, neatly folded and stacked in a square-shaped pile (I’ll have to remember to take a few of them); a gold-plated watch; knitting needles and yarn; old photographs and some letters bound together with a simple red ribbon.
I thumb through the photographs and think my heart may explode; most of them are of me. Many, but not all, are in black and white. Each one carries my grandmother’s lovely handwriting across the back detailing the date and place each picture was taken. There is a photograph of me at seven standing in the back yard next to a swing set; another when I was nine holding my new kitten, Cuddles, in my arms; at ten waiting for the school bus during a snow storm and even one from last summer — the last time I came home to visit her.
After reliving the memory each photograph holds, I set them on top of the dresser and begin opening the letters. The first one on top of the stack is addressed to me. I turn the letter over and pull away the burgundy wax seal Grandmother used to close it with, remembering how many times I saw her do this before sending hand-written letters to her friends and family. To my surprise, a whiff of wintergreen — Grandmother’s favorite — wafts up to my nose when I open the envelope and a gold ring falls out and lands on top of the dresser.
Immediately, I recognize the ring as Grandmother’s wedding band and pick it up. I stare at it and remember how she used to kiss it every morning before rising from her bed. Like her colorful costume jewelry, it’s too small for my finger so I clutch it in the palm of my hand as I read the note inside of the envelope, also written in Grandmother’s delicate hand:
Dearest Mary,
I was born from the sun and hand-forged by Elliot of Philadelphia in 1901. James placed me on Olive’s delicate finger the same year the Titanic went down and I found my place in the world.
Olive, my first lady, loved me almost as much as she loved her James and wore me as a symbol of their love every day of her life. I was there when her children: Howard, Earl, Ellie, Helen and Jimmy were born. When the Great Depression hit our doorstop and Olive refused to sell me. When Pearl Harbor was bombed, the children grew up and James died. I clung tightly to her hand and we survived.
When my lovely lady Olive is gone from this Earth, I will go to live with you, Ellie’s only daughter. You will hold me and keep me on a gold chain around your neck so that I may comfort you, resting gently against your heart from dusk to dawn, as this is Olive’s wish.
Carrying on this tradition, my next lady shall be your granddaughter, whomever she may be, and I will love her and her granddaughter just as much as I have loved the ladies before them. For I belong to you, dear ladies, and will continue to shine brightly in your eyes, if you let me, as I was born from the sun.
I’m trembling now and wondering exactly when my grandmother wrote this note. There is neither date nor signature anywhere across the front or back of the page. After reading it several more times, I refold the piece of yellowed paper and place it back inside the envelope. The ring I somehow manage to shove over the pinky finger of my left hand.
“About set?” My father asks as he carries a cardboard box into the room and sets it down on the floor.
I’m not ready to share the story of the wedding band with him just yet, so I wrap it up with the other letters and old photographs in the red ribbon and drop them into the box. Soon, the box is loaded with several pieces of costume jewelry, handkerchiefs, ointment and other such memories. Dad picks up the box and carries it from the room. “Do you smell wintergreen?” He asks.
Suddenly, I begin to laugh and Dad turns around. “What’s so funny?” He asks.
With tears now streaming down my face, I say, “Nothing… but Dad, have you ever eaten dandelion greens before?”
Mary Mack is the author of suspense-driven novels such as Reasonable Regret and Beyond Jerusalem Hill. She’s the wife of a self-proclaimed historian, mother of five and grandmother to seven. She began writing late in life at the age of 54 and does her best writing at home in her sunny guest room located in the mountains of the Poconos with her crazy cat, Bella, at her side. Mack prefers writing stories about strong, independent women like herself and her favorite pastimes include going to the movies with her husband, reading, writing and sampling the wonderful wines of the Finger Lakes region of New York state where she grew up.
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