I sat at my mother-in-law’s dining room table and looked through a box of her old photographs.

Each picture, a tiny serving of frozen time.  Smiling faces peer out of a black and white world,  telling stories of the past and explaining something of the present.

At the bottom of the box I find a large brown envelope. Inside is a photograph of my mother-in-law. She is young, tall and thin, pretty. She is standing on a stage with her husband and two other official looking people in some sort of ceremony. In a manner slightly exaggerated for the camera, she is reaching for a set of keys.  Everyone is smiling and looking into the camera.

It is the late 60s in southern California.  She is a housewife in her mid-30s.  Her children are in middle school, high school and off to college.  When her husband encouraged her to sell Tupperware to make a little mad money, she discovered that she liked it.  And she was good at it — so good that she won a car and quickly rose through the ranks to become a sales director.

It wasn’t long after the picture was taken that her husband was thrown from a horse and suffered a serious head injury. He lingered between life and death for two days before he died.  And then the world that she knew spun completely off  its axis and crashed into a million pieces.

When all was said and done, she packed up the Tupperware car with two of her boys and what was left of her life and drove back home to Texas to find healing among her family and to try to figure out how to be a single mom.

It wasn’t easy, but she carried on.  She supported herself and her three boys selling Tupperware.

I’ve always admired that about her.

Aunt Geraldine was actually my mother’s aunt which I suppose would make her my great aunt.  She’s always been one of those relatives I was never clear exactly how she fit into the family tree.

I believe Aunt Geraldine’s older sister mother, Aunt Fay, raised my mother’s baby sister after their mother died. And somehow they are related through Aunt Fay’s husband, who was a blood relative. Or not.  I’m not sure. I’m sure my mother the genealogist will send me an email shortly and straighten me out. For the 146^th time.

I bring all this up because recently I was going through a box of old childhood treasures and I came across a fragile little antique book I have had since I was 9-years-old.

The book was a gift to a young girl named Julia from her Sunday school teacher, Addie F. Simpson and it is dated December 25^th, 1875.  It is inscribed in that delicate old-fashioned cursive handwriting in sepia colored ink.  This little book is one of the very few things I own that I really care about, although I’m not certain why.   One summer, I spent a few days with Aunt Geraldine and she took me to a farm house auction where I bid on a wooden mystery box of assorted things and I won.   Inside that box was this little brown book.

Aunt Geraldine and her husband, Uncle Mario were of retirement age. They had no children of their own and therefore free to indulge their eccentricities.  They lived a tiny town in central Illinois with a population of about 200, most of which was related to my mother in one way or another.

Aunt Geraldine was a small-framed woman with soft but exacting speech. She had long gray hair that she kept in a bun, not in a severe school marm bun, but one that was always coming loose in messy wispy tendrils.  She wore wire-rimmed glasses and no make up and I don’t think I ever saw her in a pair of pants.  She had sparkling brown eyes and an especially tender heart for animals.

Her home was unkempt and not especially clean, but she had a dazzling collection of small jewel colored cut glass Cinderella slippers that she kept in her picture window that sparkled in the sunlight and her bathroom was usually occupied by an injured bird of some sort that she was nursing back to health or a litter of motherless kittens.  Her husband, Uncle Mario, was a tall and skinny Italian, also soft spoken and kindhearted and together they were a charming and delightful pair.

Aunt Geraldine had a deep and abiding love for antiques and Uncle Mario had a deep and abiding love for Aunt Geraldine.  Her hobby was going to flea markets and auctions to buy antiques and his hobby was accommodating her every whim and desire.

They bought so many antiques over the years that they eventually had to start buying houses to store them in.  They always imagined that they would refinish and restore them and maybe sell them, but they never did because they never got around to refinishing them and restoring them and moreover, because she could never bear to part with any of them.

When Aunt Geraldine died several years ago, she had a number of houses, sheds and barns that were stacked floor to ceiling with antiques, all at the mercy of the years and the  mice and all waiting for a second chance that never came.

I remember quite clearly the summer day we went to the auction.  I rode in the backseat of their car with the windows rolled down.  My hair whipped me in the face as we bumped down dusty gravel farm roads that zigged and zagged through a maze of cornfields. The air smelled sweet of hot earth and scorched corn.

When we got to the auction, we parked in a sea of cars and trucks on the lawn of a big white farm house with a wrap around front porch.  We went through the house and looked at all that was for sale.  Even though the house was filled with furnishings and all the stuff of living, it felt empty.  The farmhouse and all of its contents was to be disposed of that day, auctioned off to the highest bidder.

When the bidding started, the cadence of the auctioneer’s song was confusing to my ears. I wasn’t sure when to raise my hand.  I was timid and afraid I would buy a chair or a sofa or a tractor by mistake. Aunt Geraldine stood behind me and nudged my elbow.  I lost the first few things I bid on when they went for more than the $2 I had in my pocket.  No one but me wanted the mystery box and with the help of Aunt Geraldine, I won.

The book is now 134 years old. I’ve had it for the past 40 years.  I hope that long after I’m gone, Sean will treasure it as much as I do and keep it for his children.

But it could be that at some point, no one will care and all my stuff will be disposed of at auction and it will end up in a mystery box and in the hands of another little girl.

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Do you have a treasure with a story?

This month, my maternal grandmother would have been 109 years old.  She died in 1938 when my mother was only 4-years old, about the same age my son Sean is now .  In honor of her birthday, I am re-posting this essay I wrote about her in August of 2006.

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The day was November 7, 1938. She had turned 39 in August and was in her twelfth year of marriage to an uneducated but hard working farmer who adored her. It was never clear if she really loved him or if at the advanced age of 26, she had just given in to the fear of becoming a spinster and finally agreed to marry him when he asked her for the sixth or seventh time.

She was a tall, pretty woman with hazel eyes, a thick head of wavy auburn hair and perfect white teeth. She loved jewelry and china and books and beautiful things.  Her own mother ran off and left the family
when she was ten-years-old, leaving her to help her father raise her three younger siblings.

At an early age, she had made the unconventional decision to forego marriage and children in favor of working as a housekeeper for a wealthy doctor in order to have the nice things she loved so much. Marrying Allen Rhodes had put an end to her life of pretty things and was the beginning of a life of hard work and worry that was the lot of the farmer’s wife. Together they had five children ages 11, 8, 6, 4 and 5-weeks.

She had been suffering since the birth of the baby with severe abdominal pain and after more than a month she could bear it no more. Her father, Hiram, who had come to live with the family several years earlier, begged Allen to get help for his daughter and so the decision was made to take her to town to see a doctor. In those days, few things were more terrifying to country folk than doctors. Such a radical decision says everything about the degree of desperation and pain she was suffering.

As she stood to leave for the hospital that November afternoon, her feet must have felt as though they were made of lead. She kissed her infant daughter over and over cradling her downy soft head up to her cheek, closing her eyes and listening for the sweet purr of baby’s breath circling in her ear. She placed the baby into Hiram’s waiting arms and then kissed each of her other four children taking a long time to look into the face of each one. If there was any question of her love for Allen there was no question she loved her children more than anything in the world. In spite of the crippling pain, she couldn’t bring herself to turn away. Allen gently pulled her away and lead her to the door.

Three separate times she made it as far as the car only to return to kiss her children good-bye one more time, kissing them and weeping over them at the same time. When she turned away for the last time, she knew that she would never return.

Allen settled his sick wife in to the car for the long journey into town and waved feebly at his father-in-law as he put the car in drive. Hiram stood at the door of the farmhouse with the baby in his arms and tried to nod reassuringly. He watched the car carrying his daughter pull away, then dip and disappear into the rolling hills of corn. When there was nothing more to see but endless rows of corn, he clutched the baby tight to his chest, hung his head and shook and shivered, silently releasing all the tears he had been holding back his entire life.

As the car bumped down the country road, perhaps she bore the unbearable in silence, wordless and brave. Perhaps she gave in and beat her breast and howled long and bitter and helpless as an injured animal does when caught in a trap and left to die. Allen never spoke of it.

She never returned to the farmhouse again. She died in the hospital 12 days later. Her name was Hester. She was my grandmother.

Last Wednesday morning we got the phone call that we had been expecting. Aunt Dean had been sick for well over a year, several years really, and Wednesday morning she slipped away from us and began the life that she had spent more than 80 years preparing for – eternal life.

Death is tragic, even when expected, yet for Aunt Dean I can’t help but feel a sense of victory, the kind of victory I’ve read about in the Bible, but don’t fully understand – the victory over death that Jesus promises to those who take up his cross and follow him. I know a lot of people who talk about taking up the cross, of dying to self, but other than Aunt Dean, I don’t really know that many people who actually do it. Certainly not me.

While many of us are in a quandary about what our spiritual gifts are and wonder what God wants us to do with our lives, Aunt Dean just saw what needed to be done around her and did it.

She welcomed the outcast, took in those who needed a home, fed those who were hungry, prayed for those who needed prayer, comforted those who suffered and encouraged those who were discouraged. And she did it all quietly and without fanfare.

So then, Saturday morning we returned Aunt Dean to the earth from which she came. Under impossibly blue skies and with the sweet promise of spring in the air, we cried over her with her children.  And we grieved, not so much for her, but for ourselves.

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Aunt Dean with Sean in 2004. She stood only four feet and eleven inches tall but was a giant among believers.

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Cpl. Mike  ~ 187th Airborne, Regiment 13
February 24, 1930 – September 26, 1952

Mike was my mother’s big brother. She describes him as a shy red-headed kid who loved tinkering with motors and engines and gadgets. He joined the army and became a paratrooper and later a member of the elite Rangers. In 1952, eight years before I was born, he was shot by a Korean sniper. He died on foreign soil, in service to our country, far far away from the gently rolling midwestern cornfields of his home and his family who loved him. He was 22.