Always grow closer to the sun…

‘I’ll be okay…’

Standing alone on the balcony overlooking a skyrise hotel lobby in Indianapolis, Indiana and gripping my flip phone that was pressed to my ear, I heard a tired version of my Papaw’s voice for the very last time.

‘I’ll be okay…’

The 20-something year old me was balancing a tandem of gain and loss.

My career in the lumber industry was just beginning, although it was not unfamiliar to me. I’d spent my entire childhood watching my Papaw and uncles come and go as they harvested timber in the forests day after day. I knew what a skidder was well before I started publishing articles featuring them in a forest products industry magazine. My Papaw operated one.

On that Indianapolis balcony I stared down at my feet tucked neatly in shiny shoes atop the carpeted floor and noted the difference between my ‘work boots’ and his.

Him on dirt and me on carpet.

My Papaw died before I left that hotel. I was surrounded by hundreds of industry members, all strangers to me, as it was the very first time I’d traveled in my new role. Beginnings and ends. Tears and forced smiles.

Mamaw had already gone to be with Jesus, so losing Papaw was a closure to my childhood in a way that darkness overcomes the day as the sun sets. My grandparents played parental roles in my life. I didn’t know how to be me without them. But, I did know my mission to repay their sacrifices was still engrained in me like the growth lines of a beautiful old walnut tree.

Papaw was soil and water, while Mamaw was the sun.

Years prior and shortly after my wedding day, Mamaw came to stay a week with me to teach me how to cook. I do believe her worry for my husband’s nourishment outweighed any concern she had for our future. She’d joke that I was going to starve him…well sometimes it felt like a joke and sometimes it felt like a truth.

Growing up, we weren’t really allowed in the kitchen. Probably because my cousins and I would show up to the dinner table with full bellies from snatching fried chicken legs off the paper toweled plate before the grease finished dripping.

When Mamaw arrived at our first house as a couple, she had a set of amber glass Corning Corelle sauce pots with matching lids in tow. Already vintage status, these used pots were in pristine condition and my Mamaw- who never met a yard sale she didn’t love- stocked my kitchen with cookware as reliable as the bond I shared with her.

Just a few years ago, I was hurried as I was preparing dinner for my family and one of those pots slipped out of my hand, shattering across our marble kitchen floors…it was as if the glass wasn’t strewn throughout the kitchen, rather throughout my body as my eyes met my husband’s eyes and tears rolled down my cheeks. Neither of us said a word. He knew my loss in that sauce pot and I knew he’d clean it up as I walked away in an effort to recenter the little girl who missed her Mamaw inside of me.

Two weekends ago, I made new memories in Indianapolis…this time with my husband and daughter.

Just like my Mamaw, my daughter loves thrifting so she Googled a couple of shops she wanted to visit, I snagged us an Uber and we left my husband for a day of finding old things we loved.

Riding through the winter of the city and staring out of the car window, my daughter said, ‘Does being here bring back old memories?’

She knew I traveled to an Indianapolis meeting every winter for more than a decade, but she did not know Papaw died on my first visit.

I shared the balcony story and losing Papaw with her in that Uber as my eyes darted back and forth between the floorboard and her beautiful young face.

While the last word of the story still lingered in the air, I lifted my eyes back to the window and emotion instantly came over me when the street sign entered my vision.

There we were…at the corner of Virginia Avenue. An avenue I knew no existence of, but a name that took my breath away and provided a final sentence to the story of the loss of Papaw while in Indianapolis.

‘My Mamaw’s name…on the street sign,’ I said.

Our otherwise silent Uber driver responded, ‘Virginia?’

I settled into the wonderfulness of my grandparents’ presence on that drive and seemingly left it behind as we entered our first thrifting warehouse where I found myself wandering within and thinking of all of the people and places the items that surrounded us had known and seen.

And there she was again…my Mamaw…showing up as that beautiful pot no longer scattered on my floor. Vintage and new.

A reminder that the rings within our tree trunks also represent the years in which our branches were grown and even though our branches can sometimes be broken, new growth will arrive in our efforts to always grow closer to the sun.