Last April, I was driving and feeling overwhelmed by the consequences of some recent decisions. I never doubted that they were the best decisions for me, but the weight of them was sometimes unbearable. It caused me to second guess myself and made me feel inadequate and unsure of myself.

In an a effort to shake off the feelings, I stopped for coffee at a busy rest area off the interstate. An elderly woman of small stature was behind me in line. She reminded me of my mother, who had passed away two years earlier. The sudden yearning to talk to her and for her to know what I was going thru was sharp.

As I started to walk away with my coffee, the woman approached me. “I just have to tell you that you are my daughter.” I must have looked taken aback. She smiled and said, “I mean, you are the spitting image of my daughter. And she is a wonderful woman.”

Thanks, Mom.

I arrived at my destination, which was a visit to a friend’s new apartment in Connecticut, where he had moved the week before. A few weeks earlier, he had been at my house as I was packing and preparing to move. I had given him a few things from my house because I was downsizing. While he was visiting, he had needed to sew a button, so I offered him my mother’s sewing basket. Overwhelmed by the need to purge, it was one of the things I had been avoiding getting rid of because it reminded me so much of her. He loved the sewing basket and was pleased, despite it’s broken hinges. Before I gave it to him, though, I removed my mother’s thimble, measuring tape and a bobbin. I wanted them as keepsakes. But he needed the thimble to sew the button, so I returned it to the basket without a word.

When I walked into his apartment, the first thing I saw, among the chaos of unpacked boxes and out of place furniture, was my mother’s sewing basket. It had a prominent position on the table in his otherwise disorderly living room. When I commented that I was happy to see it, he opened it and took out the thimble. “I want you to have this back,” he said, handing it to me. “I bought myself a new one,”

Thanks, again, Mom.