she spent her life being about her Father’s business
Oh how I’d hoped to give you a hug this side of Heaven.
But you touched my life from afar. Just like you did the lives of so many others.
Letters
My Cousin JenJen
Dear JenJen, I still remember sitting there beside your mom, in a back pew of the church. She was wearing her raspberry red maternity dress with matching red heels. And there, in the middle of church, I got to feel you move when your mom put my hand on her tummy. When you were on…
Dear Grama
Dear Grama, It was from you I inherited my love of the written word. Some of my earliest memories of you are watching you at your typewriter. I was fascinated to watch the letters appear on the paper, and even more intrigued at the way the correction tape could erase them when I distracted you…
Dear Papa
Dear Papa, I knew something was wrong that morning. I woke up at your house and you weren’t sitting there at your table by the fire. You were always there. Every morning and every evening. At night you were making notes on your veterinary clients of the day. At daybreak you were taking notes on…
Dear Grandpa
Dear Grandpa, There are two smells that are forever intertwined with my memories of you: fiberglass and butterscotch. You never have liked chocolate, a fact which Grandma and I were always unable to understand. But you loved your Butterscotch cookies and candies. And you were my most faithful “Cookies Express” customer, paying for dozens of…
Dear Grandma
Dear Grandma, Every spring a few weeks before your birthday, your wooded lawn starts filling with little blossoms we’ve always called “spring beauties”. When we were children, we’d gather the blooms with wild abandon. You’d help us wrap their delicate stems in a moistened paper towel covered with saran wrap to keep them fresh as…
to my firstborn
Dear Ruth Ann, You are my eldest, my artist, the one who keeps me on task but forgets to stay on task. You have your daddy’s laid-back personality combined with the typical traits of an oldest, but oh you have your mother’s penchant for getting so lost in your art that you forget everything else….
My Mary Kate
Dear Mary Kate, There’s no way to put into words the giggle in your voice, the lilt in the way you pronounce words. A photo can capture the sprinkling of tiny freckles across your button nose, but it would take a non-stop video camera to record everything that makes you Mary Kate. You are developing…
imaginary world
Dear Ruth, You visit an imaginary world each night in your dreams. One where Aslan is both King and Friend, where Caspian is your knight in shining armor, and where there is everything you could wish. “In my Narnia there is a door into Radiator Springs,” you explain,” and a door into Betsy and Tacy’s…
To the God Who Knows
Dear Father, You know this weekend is the one our calendars call Mother’s Day. And you know the mixed emotions it brings to the heart of every woman old enough to be a mother. You know the feelings of inadequacy that inevitably come to my mother heart every Sunday morning, only magnified on Mother’s Day…
the big little farmer
Dear Son, You’re two years old and getting so big as you remind us so often. Everything is big to you. You want it big and you want more of it. Big tractors, big bulls, more hay bales. It’s a big world for our little farmer. You might play with toy baby bulls, but if…
Dear Son
Dear Son, When I found out I was expecting you, I secretly hoped you would be a boy. Your daddy loves your sisters — his two little princesses. (He liked what a customer had told him: “Having girls always made my husband feel like a king!”) But I had a feeling a son would make…
The End.
The End.