I am sitting typing this at home. Since we got the new computer, Keith moved the "old" one into our bedroom to allow me some quiet, private space to type and play. We ended up putting the computer monitor and keyboard on an old fashioned vanity. It is old, made of mahogony--a ladies dressing table. Beautiful carvings accent the wood and there is a large mirror directly opposite where the keyboard rests. As I sit and type I can't help but to catch glimpses of myself in that mirror.
My house if filled with "antiques". The running joke around here is everything was new when it was purchased because everything here has been owned by someone family at some point in time. This vanity is an example. It matches the bedroom set my husband and I have now claimed as our own. There is something so special knowing that this suite was a wedding gift from Grandpa to Grandma. This furniture is alive with memories.
I can't help but to marvel as I sit here and type; there, in my reflection, is a woman in her middle forties, short hair, no makeup and dressed in jeans. And I wonder about the reflections the mirror used to pass along. Those of my Grandmother, young and fresh and so very sheltered compaired to me. How often did she sit here to fix her long hair; to put it up with pearl combs? And what did she ponder as she powdered her nose staring into the same commentator that I now sit before emersed in my thoughts?
I don't think Grandma and I were that much different. She was a dollmaker and a seamstress, she embroidered and knitted and made all the curtains that hung in all of her and Poppa's houses. A talented woman, she loved to make a house a home and in her quiet time, she wrote poetry and short stories. It is hard not to find her prose somewhere in the things that now speak of her memory because she would fill the inside of book covers, magazines, even tops of boxes with her fancies. She wrote often and she wrote on everything that would hold the markins of her mind.
And so here I sit. At the same vanity, on the same chair, filling an electronic notepad with my own little ramblings. And for some reason I find it very comforting to know that there are such similarities between my Grandma and me. And I look forward, even more eagerly now, to tomorrow's gathering of family. It will be one more special opportunity to experience the intimate connection between the past, present and future--all of which will be contained in my two sons' eyes.
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