Not travel related but a story i'd like to share

Normally I post travel related items on this blog, but today I'd like to share a more personal story, as I do write other things beside travel articles.

I've been attempting to clean and organize my basement so I'm in the process of moving things I want to save from cardboard boxes to plastic bins. I've come across many mementos from my past, but one particular item I came across today had me standing in the basement sobbing.

My grandmother, my father's mother, died when I was 4, so I have very few memories of her. Plus she barely spoke English (having come from Poland in the early 1900's) so she didn't say much. However, I remember her giving me a wall hanging she made out of a picture of a little girl praying that she cut out of a magazine. She said it reminded her of me. It was just pasted on construction paper with gold cording glued to the outside of the paper. I had it in my room when I was small. When I got to be a pre-teen/teenager it got put away and for some reason I thought I threw it out because it got wrinkled. As an adult, I often regretted the fact I didn't save it, as I have only a few items that were my grandmas.

Well, today I was moving some stuff out of a box of papers that I would have had when I still lived with my parents, over 35 years ago. There were a couple of scrap books in there, with mainly newspaper clippings about various things and some vacation mementos. I just happened to flip through one and OMG.....There was the wall hanging that my grandma made, stuck between the pages.

I must have stood there for 10 minutes crying, I don't know why. I don't know how it got there. I don't remember putting it in there. Then I thought maybe I did throw it out and one of my parents saw it, fished it out of the garbage, most likely ironed it and put it in the scrapbook many years ago. They are both deceased so I can't ask them, but it was a wonderful surprise to find this item.

When I run errands today for sure I'm going to get a frame to put it in!