Mother’s Day #2 Without You
I have been dreading this day all year. It’s meant to celebrate the women that give us life. I am now a mother and get to experience it as a mother should. It makes us feel cherished and loved by those that we cherish and love most everyday, our children. This year is the 2nd Mother’s Day I will celebrate without my mother. It has been weighing heavy on me for weeks. I knew that I wanted to do something to celebrate my mother, even though she’s not with me. But I couldn’t. think of anything I deemed special enough.
One day, I was sitting in our shop, working on restoring my latest project when I looked over and saw my mother’s cedar chest. I walked over to it, opened it up, and started sorting though my mother’s personal treasures. My mother owned this chest longer than she had me. It is filled with wedding keep sakes, pictures, baby clothes, and an unfinished quilt she had started when my great grandma Farley was teaching her to quilt. If you know anything of loss, then you know it is these things that mean the most to us when we lose a loved one.
It was then that I had my Mother’s Day idea. I gently removed all of the items, Bagged and boxed them up, and got to work. The chest itself is in rough shape, with one side busted and cracks in the top. Much like my mother, who lived a life that wasn’t always easy, and she. often had nothing more than hurt to show. for her troubles. But I started working on cleaning it up any way. I cleaned the surface, and removed the hardware. Then I primed and painted the outside of the chest a pretty antique white. Then I took that old unfinished patchwork quilt topper and applied to the lid of the chest.
It’s all together now and I am proud of the result. It gave an old chest a fresh look, while also keeping true to the woman who carefully collected and stored these treasures for me and my sister to keep. It still doesn’t look perfect, but now makes me think of mom and smile.
