Hand-Me-Downs

A milestone birthday approaches. In the midst of the apprehension of reaching an age that once seemed so very far away and so very, very old, I've been helping to clear out my mother's little yellow house while settling her in a new, much-smaller space.

That intimate task brings to the surface a fact I cannot ignore. I am becoming my mother.

It's not just the times when my children will say "Yes, Grandma Barb" when her sage advice comes from my mouth. It's a whole collection of things - literally - that I have made my own. 

It's the colorful assortment of used twist ties in a kitchen drawer. It's the rinsed-out plastic bags and bread wrappers stored away for another use. It's the way I wash the kitchen towels and dishcloths and cloth napkins in a load by themselves, with hot water and every-so-often bleach. It's the perfectly-good jelly and mayonnaise jars with lids on the pantry shelf.

It's the boxes of photos sorted yet another time, one-by-one from one stack to another as the waste basket moved in front of the couch to receive the discards remains empty.

And this morning, pulling a load of work clothes (you know the ones - the patched ones, the stained ones, the ones with ripped seams and missing buttons) from the dryer, I decided that wonderful old soft blue t-shirt (a castoff from my then-teenage daughter) was just too immodest even for garden work.

I cut away the seams to make this pile of rags - so like those in the carefully-labeled bag I found in the back of  my mother's pantry just last week.