Love Letters

My mother loved tea pots.

Lined up across the top of her kitchen cabinets were probably fifteen of them.  No – more.  I don’t remember.

But there were a lot.  Various sizes and shapes and colors.

And I know they all had a story.

But I wasn’t paying enough attention back then.

(And for that, I will always be sorry.)

But the teapots.  All lined up.  Packed carefully in boxes for each move.

Half of them had some little treasure tucked away inside.  Some of them had the tea pot’s own story written down in there in my mother’s harsh slanted cursive on torn pieces of notebook paper.

And when my mother passed away we divided the tea pots amongst the grandchildren.

Last week I climbed on top of a chair in the kitchen and reached up to a high shelf and pulled a plain blue and cream colored teapot down to my level.

It was unbelievably dusty.  (As are so many things in our kitchen.  What’s going on in there for goodness sake?)

Out of curiosity, I opened the pottery lid and peeked inside.

I was rewarded.

And how.

A small stack of pieces of torn notebook paper.

There wasn’t a history of this particular tea pot.

Instead, they were notes.

Love notes.

Written back and forth between my mother and my father.

Sweet letters of affection and romance and love and a life shared in the same space, heading in the same direction.

I love these love letters.

I love this history that is my father’s and my mother’s and is mine too.

And I love the surprise of a treasure tucked in a treasure.