In January, I held a friend’s grandbaby who snuggled in my arms and fell fast asleep. For a long time, I watched the sleeping babe, free of any care in the world, and tried to keep my mind focused on the program I was attending. But ever so often, the little person cradled in my arms reminded me of the many times I had rocked our children and grandchildren to sleep. What a good feeling. What a good memory.
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Some see red roses and sweet romance on Valentine’s Day.
For others, it means decadent chocolates and expensive jewelry.
Still others exchange greeting cards with heartfelt messages.
For the very young, Valentine’s Day brings decorated boxes filled with lots of little cards featuring childish pictures of flying insects buzzing, “Won’t you ‘bee’ my Valentine” and candy hearts with similarly silly sayings.
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For me this Valentine’s Day, I’ve encountered a different kind of love story.
In 1909, before their first child was born, my grandparents bought a new rocking chair, and for well over a decade, my grandmother rocked her four babies in that chair. Sometime along the way, she created a footstool out of seven coffee cans covered with a tapestry fabric to use with her chair.
Shortly before I was born, my grandmother gave my mother the rocker and she rocked me, her only child, in it. Because my grandmother moved in with my parents after the death of my grandfather, she, too, rocked me and her other grandchildren in that familiar chair.
Before our oldest was born, my mother passed along the well used rocker, already recovered countless times, and I rocked our daughter, then our first son. After we moved to Georgia, Bob refinished the rocker to its original maple shade before our third child, another boy, was born. I rocked him in it, too.
Over the years, I’ve enjoyed every opportunity that I’ve had to to sit in it and rock each of our seven grandchildren. Nothing compares to the feel of a baby asleep in one’s arms.
Before we moved to the coast, we had the rocker recovered with a green hued print of sea shells, appropriate, I thought, for a home situated on a salt water creek.
When we moved into this new house, 1,000 feet smaller than our Jesup home, we ended up with wall to wall furniture. Over the years, we’ve given our children some of the furniture we had inherited from our families. This Christmas, we gave each of our children an antique chair, complete with as much of its story as we knew.
But, selfishly, I’ve kept the rocker for myself. Bob has once again strengthened the chair, now one hundred years old, and reunited with its footstool, it resides in our guest bedroom.
And so on this Valentine’s Day today, as I sit in this antique rocker and move with its own internal rhythm, I reflect on all of the love, between husbands and wives, between mothers and children, between grandmothers and grandchildren, shared within the arms of this chair. Life continues. Love grows. And on rare occasions along the way, we encounter a witness, like my old rocker, to a family history.
A different kind of love story.
2009
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