I packed about six boxes together of my mother’s belongings just before she died. Over the years those six boxes have been whittled down to just two boxes. Almost eighties years of a lifetime can be found at a gravesite and two plastic totes that I bought at Menards.
The boxes were exposed from the back of the closet last week when I took the Christmas decorations out that covered them up.
I could immediately smell my mom’s perfume when I opened the first box. The first thing lying on top was a bible and a picture of my mom with her family when she was a girl. My Grampa John, who I am named after. My Gramma Loretta, who was my biggest influence behind my Oldman. My mom’s oldest sister, Theresa who became a cloistered nun when she turned eighteen. My mom’s little sister, Barb, my favorite Auntie and my Ma sitting in the middle. They were the typical German American family out of Saint Joan of Arc Parish in Indianapolis.
I came across my mom’s press badge from when she worked at Channel 13. Countless rosaries, a memo calendar from 1985, Christmas cards she kept, costume jewelry, old insurance papers and a drawing of a house. A house that I would someday buy for her when I was all grown up.
I kept the Afghan my Gramma gave my Ma when I was born. From the size of it, I probably outgrew it by my third week of living with my parents in Edgewater.
I opened a smaller decorative box that contained hundreds of pictures that my mom collected through the years. Pictures from my mom’s youth through her adulthood. She had pictures of me through my early years as well. Ceil had dozens of pictures of George and Fritz, but none of Hazel. Hazel appeared just a couple years before my Ma died.
I found a picture of me and Beth Lewis at the prom. I immediately took a picture of the picture and texted it to her. Several minutes later a heart popped up on the text.
I also found a picture of me and my Ma from a trip we took to Florida in the late 1970’s. She was in her early forties sporting a big dark head of hair cropped like Helen Reddy. I had a big bowl of sandy brown hair that my mom said made me look like Robert Redford.
The picture was taken on a boat on the Gulf of Mexico that family friends owned. The friend worked at Tropicana and had a cooler of every juice flavor they made. I discovered flavors that I never heard of on that boat trip. Flavors that you couldn’t find back home at the Jewels.
My mom had a big smile on her face. Something I rarely saw growing up. I had a long gaze in my eyes that could be mistaken for looking out across the Tampa Bay, but when I saw that stare in the picture, I knew better. It was the look of a troubled and sad twelve-year-old kid whose parents recently went through a divorce.
Seeing my mom holding it together made me realize how hard she worked at being a single mother. She saved and borrowed all she could to fly us down and I was miserable the entire time.
I didn’t put the picture back in the box that contained her entire life. The picture is on my dresser next to her ashes and one of the many Virgin Mary statues she left to me after she went to heaven.
I’ve got boxes for my dad as well and someday the entire life of John Stephen Marian Shepley will be in a box shoved in the back of Hazel’s basement. We will all end up in a box of memories held dearly by those that follow.
I call it the hyphen box because our lifetime is marked with a hyphen between our birth year and the year of our death. Try to fill your Hyphen Box with a life story full of happiness, some heartbreak, hidden messages, treasure tales and especially love.
Definitely LOVE or in my case JumboLove.
Today is Bill of Rights Day. I don’t need to explain to you what that is. You should have paid attention in American History 101.
December is halfway in the books and today is more like March than just two weeks before Christmas.
Christmas… it can be painful and it can be astonishing.
Make it astonishing
