I find my grandmother’s letter tucked in a Ziploc bag plump with old birthday cards.
Friendly cursive handwriting offers the words I remember her speaking to me. Perhaps it’s this longing for her, of evidence of her existence and our special connection, that leads me to brave the top-shelf of my childhood bedroom’s closet.
Initially, I think it’s the sweepings of Scorpio that carry me to Kentucky, to my childhood bedroom, to clear, clean, create anew. Scorpio governs death and rebirth, cycles of retreat and reemergence, and I believe it’s a Scorpio-seized focus that galvanizes a quest to sift and sort through the pages thick with my past.
I borrow a stool from the kitchen to assist in reaching the highest corners of my closet. On tiptoe, I grasp overflowing boxes tasked with messily maintaining my journals, keepsakes, plethora of adolescent poems, half-written short stories, and completed works.
The boxes (an assortment of blue polka dot and dignified red purchases from Tuesday Morning and Target) heave sighs of relief as I unpack and surround myself with a montage of colorful covers that contain rivers of writings.
And for the first time in decades, I read the impressions, the intensified emotions, the intuitive recollections from my younger selves. As I scan over entries, I break new territory. I can read because my heart toward my former selves has matured in gentleness. I greet younger me with compassion, humor, and am surprised, not by the pain that I knew would be in those pages (for I am highly sensitive person who viscerally feels everything), but by the playful joy, the genuine gratitude, and spiritual revelations etched into the tender and energized, often caffeinated, journaling.
There’s love here.
There’s a careful preservation of moments that crystalize warmth, belonging, acceptance. It’s as if thirteen-year-old me knew that I would need the boost, the emboldened remembering years later. And I know there was love because the feeling hums a truth that expands my heart center in the now.
I place my grandmother’s letter on my bedroom’s bulletin board. As a teenager, the board swirled as a collage of friends, and today it’s postcards depicting lavender hued plains outside of Marfa, Texas, homemade cards punctuating happy birthday in pink marker, a black-and-white snapshot of a stylish woman sharing coffee with an equally chic dog.
I lovingly release the keepsakes and the partially filled notebooks. I organize and stack the written and published stories. I muse on what to do with the rest – with the journals, with decades of documentation. I might bless and recycle. I might categorize based on year and store.
The question remains and I make peace with that. Whatever I choose to do, there’s the integration of bone-deep reassurance that I was loved, by my grandmother, even by my younger self who seeks, introspects and affirms her own self-love.
I am her, and she is me, and my grandmother’s letter is from a woman who saw through the internal striving and understood my sensitivity.
Before discovering the letter, the spirit of my grandmother Peggy visits me.
Recently, in the morning on the back porch, I meditate and witness a red cardinal, a messenger of crossed-over spirits, flit through the pine trees and I immediately sense the lightness of her presence.
Her presence lures a memory to resurface.
She rests on a dusty rose sofa overlooking the garden her father kept, poetry books and Carl Jung’s theories nestled in close by her side.
“You have no idea how much I love you,” she says while her fingers strum along a white quilt, delicately playing with her wedding rings.
I’m an emotionally heightened teen prone to upheavals that I now see stem from suppressing my sensitivity, and as I stand in the doorway, hearing her words murmured to the peaceful quiet that holds us, I desperately wonder how could she possibly love me.
But she did. I feel and better understand that type of unconditional love now. I receive her love now as I embrace the young writers who are me. I breathe the essence into my lungs, welcome the energy to enliven and instruct my cells on how to grow, heal, thrive as a person secured in lovability and the capacity to extend and give love fluidly.
I tuck the corners of my grandmother’s letter underneath the pink and green ribbon that crisscrosses the board. A revered relic from the sweeping out, the Scorpio-sparked beginning again, I glance up to her words to strengthen relaxed authenticity. It’s tangible proof that serves me and I trust that when and if the day comes for the letter to be placed away, like the journals, the truth of that connection is already written into the stars of who I am.
And isn’t that why I write? To re-remember a truth, my truth, our shared truth. Almost thirty years’ worth of journals and letters that all circle back to the truth that we’re love and we’re here to love and to love greatly. That’s what my grandmother Peggy continues to teach me, and this is the gem of truth found in the Scorpio-swept tidying.