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Dear Reader,
When I flew back home from my mother's funeral a couple of months ago, I brought a bunch of extra suitcases along with me. They were filled with her recipes, photos, letters, fancy hankies, crocheted pillow cases and other things that I wanted to sort through. It's going to take a long time to look through everything, because when I pick something up it makes me think, 'Oh, I remember when...' And then I sit back and enjoy the walk down memory lane.
I have a lot of "things" to remind me of my mother and my grandmother, but I've always thought that it would have been neat if there would've been some "secret" or "womanly ritual" that my grandmother had shared with my mother, and then my mother shared it with me, and I passed it on to my daughter and on and on--it could travel down through the generations.
It sounds so neat when I hear other women rendering one of those, "every year all the women in our family" sentiments. The women in the family get together and go on a trip to the Pyramids, they sew a quilt from keepsake material from their great-great grandmother's wedding dress, or they get out the family recipes and cook all day long, making dishes that have been handed down since the days when their ancestors crossed the Rocky Mountains in a covered wagon. (Okay, I may be exaggerating just a bit.)
My mother never revealed any such profound rituals to me. But there was something that I discovered amongst her mementos that I think was an unspoken, passed-down-from-mother-to-daughter tradition. Granted, it doesn't rank up there with the sacrosanct family recipes of years gone by, but I'm going to pick up the torch and carry on the tradition nevertheless. I'm typing up my copy this afternoon.
Tucked away in one of her recipe boxes, I found two well-worn, recipe cards with almost identical poems on them. The only difference was that one had Virginia Tindell--my mother's name inserted in it--and the other had Lillian Hale, my grandmother's name. My Grandma Hale appeared to be the original author of the "shame-on-you" poem, and both my mother and grandmother had each faithfully carried a copy in their purse.
And here's what I read:
"Steal not this purse, for fear of shame.
for Virginia Tindell is not your name.
And when you die, the Lord will say,
where is that purse you stole that day?
And if you say, I do not know.
The Lord will say, step down below."
Well, what can I say? That's my family legacy!
Thanks for reading with me. It's so good to read with friends.
Suzanne Beecher
Suzanne@DearReader.com
www.DearReader.com
P.S. In September I'm going on vacation and I thought it would be fun to see if a couple of readers would like to fill in for me. Enter the "Write a Dear Reader Contest". For more information go to: http://www.supportlibrary.com/nl/users/734/web/winbooks.html
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