Immigration Journal

1956

FEBRUARY 9TH

Last night I had a dream of an old memory: I was young again and sitting beside my mother, looking into the shoebox of drawings she had made of what the world was like when she was young. She told me of how she and father had met, and as she talked I felt a look of wonder begin to spread on my face. Would I ever find a love like the one my mother and father did? I asked myself, looking from the face of my mother to the sketches that she held in her hand adoringly.

Then I blinked and when my eyes opened again I was back laying on my heavily quilted bed, my eighty-year-old eyes looking up into the youthful face of my granddaughter.

My granddaughter, Betty is her name, has the energetic lifestyle of any other youth but she always saves time to visit and help out these old bones of mine. For the past year I’ve been trying to put together all the stories and pictures of mine and my husbands history into a album and Betty’s been helping me with gluing, cutting, typing, and anything else that needs being done; but she doesn’t work cheap, I’ve to tell her my stories to pay her.

I tell her of how horrible the beautiful place we now live in now once was and of all the funny things that her father did when he was a wee little boy. And as she glues in the last page of the story for today, I tell her of how her grandfather (bless ‘im) and I fell in love.

Betty looks up from her furious typing on my trusty typewriter and on her face I see the familiar expression of wonder that I wore as I heard a similar story from my mother.

I’ve barely finished when my eldest son comes in to pick up his daughter. He smiles at me, obviously with less time for his mother than his daughter has for her grandmother, and lovingly tugs Betty out to his “baby blue” vehicle. And I’m left with only the silence and my memories.