A Special Object

We have been spending the last several weeks writing personal narratives in my classroom. In the interest of fostering a love of writing, I have been joining them in each assignment and writing during their workshop time. I'm sharing a few of them here as models for personal narrative. They are certainly not perfect, but they're stories from my life. Please feel free to follow and comment!

They look like any other hand-made beads. Small, imperfect spheres made from marbled clay. A hole poked through to string them on a now-tattered yellow ribbon. This necklace appears to be of negligible value, but a handful of people know that it was lovingly made by a grandmother for her young granddaughter. 

My grandmother, Mary Martin, had been ill my whole life. I don't recall her without a cane, walker, or wheelchair, nor do I remember a time when she wasn't weakened by a series of unusual health issues. There was a pituitary tumor and Guillain-Barre, but I was too young to grasp the implications of such diagnoses, too young to know anything more than that she needed to be in the hospital for a very long time. I simply visited or played with the clay her occupational therapist had given her. I'm part of the sandwich generation--one layer of bread for my mother to look after as she was caring for aging parents. I was brought to the hospital and provided a distraction from the seemingly endless days of therapy, which I later realized must have been painful. 

One day, though, Bubba (as I called her) had made tiny blue and green clay beads in a therapy session. She painstakingly rolled them and eventually strung them on a small, shiny yellow ribbon. That ribbon was eventually tied around my neck. I carried them on my wedding day, eleven years after she was taken from us. Someday, I hope to tie them around the neck of my little girl, her great-granddaughter, and tell her of a lady who sang songs, watched plays, and wore sneakers with cows on them in the family room of a home on Rockledge Drive.