my gramma ruth was a “saver”…having been born in the 20’s…grown up in the depression of the 30’s…and lived and served through a world war…
it was always fascinating…when i was still young and whenever we were out at the farm…to steal away down to the basement and poke through the time capsule that was her cellar closet…
or into auntie terry’s bedroom…where everything had stayed the way that she’d left it when she’d walked out the door as a new bride on that fall day in 1974. her bureau top was still laid out with her childhood nick-knacks…her spread on the bed unchanged…her prom dress even-still hanging in the closet!
so after gramma passed, a lot of the things that my sisters came across as they worked to empty her house came as no surprise…
but there were a few…
one, in particular, was the stash of leftover slivers of soaps that my younger sister discovered when she opened the cupboard doors and peered beneath the bathroom sink…
years…and years…worth of slivers!
some things were dispersed among family…some were donated…and some were (even) thrown away…
but some…like those soaps…my sister just couldn’t bear to toss…
so they went home with her and sat at her house for a time…until just this last christmas…when she had a (most) lovely thought…
and when i opened our family’s gift from hers…i was so excited to find amongst the nummy homemade pickles and jams and jellies she’d made…my very own jar of gramma ruth’s soaps!
my older sister, my younger and i…none of us inherited the “saving” gene…
we’re more the opposite, really…gramma wouldn’t understand our tendency to periodically “purge”…
but the very thought that grampa and gramma’s work-worn hands lathered up with these soaps before supper…after a long day down at the barn or out in the fields…makes them worth my hanging onto…well worth my saving…
that…and the priceless gift of getting to crack the lid every now and again and breathe in that all-too-familiar…but i never dreamed i’d smell again…fragrance of them!
