Often, it’s tied to family tradition.
~Jack Dolan
“There’s a Christmas card from A.F. in the mail today,” said Mom. “I saved it so we could open it together.”
A.F. was our family’s abbreviation for our Great-Aunt Flora. Technically, she was Mom’s aunt and my great-aunt, but everyone just called her A.F.
Mom took the letter opener, slit open the envelope very carefully and retrieved the card. She placed the card on the table without opening it while we hovered over the envelope, something we did whenever we received a card or letter from our dear aunt.
“How does she do that?” I asked.
“She uses a pencil eraser,” Mom replied. “I’ve watched her do it.”
Great-Aunt Flora was one of the original “recyclers.” She turned every envelope inside-out, wrote a new address on the previous inside panel, and reclosed it with a small dab or two of clear stationery glue — the kind that came in an hourglass bottle with a pink rubber dauber on the end of it.
“She got this one from Cousin Pearl,” said Mom, squinting to read the handwriting on the new inside corner of the envelope. “I can’t quite make out the postmark, though.”
We finished marveling at the envelope and turned our attention to the card.
The Santa with the bulging bag of toys on the front panel looked a little haggard, but was otherwise intact. Inside, where someone, most likely Cousin Pearl, had signed her name, the bottom had been neatly cut off the card with a pair of pinking shears, leaving a jagged bottom above which Great-Aunt Flora had scrawled her name.
I laughed while Mom sighed. “I’ve given her boxes of new cards,” she said, “twenty-five to a box. But as far as I know, she saves them for God-only-knows-what-reason!”
When I left to attend college, I started receiving my own cards from A.F. Sometimes, she enclosed two well-worn, one-dollar bills, folded and smoothed numerous times, but I never received them inside a “new” card.
As A.F.’s health began to fail, she moved into assisted living, and Mom and Aunt Jo took on the onerous task of cleaning out the house where she’d lived for nearly eighty years.
“How are you set for greeting cards?” Mom asked me during one of our weekly phone chats.
“Let me guess,” I replied. “You found a dozen boxes of brand-new cards?”
“More like three dozen.” Mom sighed. “I just don’t know what we’re going to do with all the things she’s ‘saved’ over the years.”
“Umm…” I hesitated, but decided it was now or never. “Could I put in my bid for the pinking shears?”
There was a short pause. “Most of the black paint is worn off the hand grips,” Mom replied. “You’d probably be better off buying a new pair.”
“I don’t care about the paint.”
I waited through another short pause and another sigh. Finally, Mom said, “You’ll have to get in line. Aunt Jo and I are going to arm wrestle for them.”
Great-Aunt Flora was ninety-eight when she passed. Mom must have won the arm-wrestling contest because, right after A.F.’s funeral, I got a brand-new card from Mom with the inside bottom cut off with a jagged edge.
“Mom!” I gasped in disbelief. “You don’t need to cut the bottom off the card if it hasn’t ever been signed!”
“Family tradition,” explained Mom. “I wouldn’t want you to forget your roots.”
Mom was right. Roots are important. That’s why, when Mom passed nearly thirty years after A.F., the pinking shears were the first thing I claimed for my own. Today, they hold a place of honor on my desk, reminding me forever and always that I come from a long line of amazing women.
~Jan Bono
