Too late for Mother's Day

but not yet the 4th of July

In early April, a card from my cousin Barbara arrived in the mail. It was sandwiched between a junk circular and a grocery ad. I nearly tossed into the recycling. But then I spotted my name in cursive across the envelope and set it aside to open after lunch.

Amy and I had just sat down at the dining room table when she reached for the envelope. “You don’t mind if I open it?” she asked—already lifting the seal.

Out came a card, two photographs, and a folded piece of paper. “There’s a note,” Amy said, beginning to read while I slurped a spoonful of soup. Then she held up two photos. One showed me as a baby in my mother’s arms, dated November 1957. The second was of me holding my daughter, Talia, in August 1993. “Sweet,” Amy said. “You and Talia at the same age.”

As she examined the photo of my mother and me, Amy noticed writing on the back. She read aloud:

“Hi Folks, I am your cousin Jennifer and I would be very happy to meet you all here soon. With all my love and kiss for everyone. Yours, Jennifer, 4 1/2 weeks.”

“My mother must have written that,” I said without really looking.

But the wording stayed with me. My mother never called me Jennifer—I was always Jenny. It was Grandma who used Jennifer, or “Chenifer,” as she pronounced it. Maybe she wrote the note. If so, was it simply joyful news of my arrival—or a pointed nudge to my aunt Hilda, Barbara’s mother, to come visit already!?

Later that afternoon, I looked the third enclosure in the card, a paragraph Grandma had penned entitled, “How can I escape the heat?”

Barbara had written that the paragraph was Grandma’s English homework, probably from late 1941 or early 1942. Grandma would have been 38 or 39 and hadn’t been to school since she was sixteen in 1917. Her 10-sentence assignment sounded much like the letters that she used to write to me. It ended,

I went down to the Hudson River and sat down under a big tree. It was beautiful. First of all, I had the fresh air, sun and a wonderful view. I saw a lot of boats passing by and I really enjoyed it and I didn’t feel the heat.

There’s the odd mid-paragraph use of “first of all.” And, the last sentence is actually three. But the verb tenses are correct. There are no misspellings. I’ve been studying German for years now, and my German teacher would point out word order, spelling, and clashing-article errors if I tried to translate those sentences into German.

Barbara told me that she remembers holding me as a baby, so at some point, Aunt Hilda did make it to Spencerport. And Hilda immediately responded yes when I sent her an invitation to Talia’s baby naming. At that cozy celebration, her face (and everyone else’s) was full of emotion that Grandma frequently used: amazement, delight, luck, love, and life.

---

Stumbling Blocks, my book, is now available for preorder at:

Bookshop.org

Books-a-Million

Amazon