Love in a Box

"How many times have I told my children that I had given them a box of love? Which in actuality is a pretend box of nothing--air--representing love.  After receiving a wonderful package in the mail recently, I was reminded of this box.

"It was not my birthday, not a holiday or any special day.  It was a box full of thoughtfulness packed with care, full of things I could probably use...because someone thought of me. To me, it was a box of love.

"Yup, I think this world needs more boxes mailed.  Just a little effort is a great deed. (Thanks, box-sender.)"

This sweet bit of prose was written by my daughter and shared on Facebook.  It reminded me of boxes my grandmother sent to my mother when I was a little girl.  How exciting it was to dig through the considerably large cartons filled with mysterious things from far away Texas!  My grandmother, with a large family herself, knew that anything she sent would be put to good use.

There were dresses, coats, pants, and all manner of things, most of which would not fit anybody, but Mama was an expert at "making over" clothes.  After all, some of our young uncles and aunts were not much older than Mama's eldest children.  Mama's treadle Singer sewing machine was kept busy clothing nine of us kids during those WWII years.  What she didn't redesign into proper-fitting garments, our resourceful mother cut woolen garments into squares and pieced together warm quilts for our several beds.

I don't remember whether the boxes came by US Mail or were shipped some other way.  I know the postage for mailing would have been prohibitive at today's rates!  Usually a letter accompanied the box, and my 5-year-old fingers would trace the penciled letters of Grandma's handwriting.   Just think, I would ponder, Grandma's hand formed these very words!  (I didn't remember ever having seen my grandmother, and I endowed her with all kinds of virtues and qualities.)

Grandma often enclosed pictures of her large family, romanticized in my mind as the ideal household.   They seemed always to be receiving some award, commendation or diploma.  The dashingly handsome and beautiful figures in the studio portraits sang solos, wore sharp military uniforms, or sported corsages, things foreign to our back-woods, hill-country lives.

When I grew up, I realized that Mama's family, of which she was the eldest child (whose own mother had died in Mama's infancy) was just an ordinary family, having hailed from the hills of Tennessee and were simple, hard-working folk like anyone else.  According to my mother, Grandma did like to put on airs a bit, but that didn't matter when we received those wonderful boxes of love, love that would stretch from generation to generation.