Mom's been gone over two years now, but I'm still going through things that were left behind. She loved to collect and cook food from recipes in these small cookbooks. You know, the cookbooks that are soft cover, staple-bound, thin and were provided by a food manufacturer. As you can see in the image below, there are some from Skinner, Hershey's, Campbells. There were dozens of them in a box. As I was flipping through them, this little "The Best is Yet to Come" booklet was in the stack.
I opened it up and turns out it was a journal......
...and the first page I turn to is heartbreaking.
I keep finding these types of journals everywhere. Most recently, I found a yellow paged legal pad that had diary entries jotted on it. I've found workbooks that accompanied daily meditations where she added a reflection, or just a fact or two of what life held that day. There was one I found that had days and days of words that described my dad's final days alive.
While it's incredibly painful to come across these in such random fashion, I can't help but consider them sweet gifts. They are snapshots of her life. They were tough time times, grateful days, happy events. When I read them, I hear the words in my head in her voice. I can see her expressions in my mind's eye.
I also adore the handwriting itself; the mixture of lower case & capital letters in wonky places. I see the diminishing quality of her handwriting through the years as she aged, and as she was sick. I wonder how many generations will go by before handwriting itself is obsolete? The journals I find will eventually be "ancient" like they way of hieroglyphs & petroglyphs.
I really don't know what to do with these journals. For now, I will hold on to them, for they are her. And I can hold her. <3
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