A Message From My Mother

Do you think we get messages from beyond the grave? I think we do. There has been a lot of documentation to this effect, and if you read Angels On Earth magazine they always have accounts of people receiving messages from loved ones who have passed on. I think I received a card from my mom, some 35 years after her death.

I was thinking about her one day, remembering how she always sent my children little Valentines, or Easter cards, or Halloween cards, she was very good about that. She could never afford to go and buy them the kinds of gifts their other grandmother sent, but her cards were sweet. I was always grateful for her thoughtfulness toward my children. I’m not sure what prompted the thought, it was around the holidays, and I was probably thinking I should send my own grandchildren a card.

It was either that day, or the next, when I was cleaning the little bathroom in this house, that I moved the old fruit crate I got from the Roseville auction in 1975. I have always used the crate as a shelf somewhere, either on a wall or on a toilet-tank in the bathroom. It’s quite old, and I’ve hauled it around with me for years, packing stuff into it when I moved, or filling it with stuff and keeping it in storage with my other boxes when I was in Minnesota. So here I was, dusting and wiping down the mirror and the tank top, and I moved the box to dust it. That’s when I found the card.

It was just a little card, the kind you might attach to a gift at Christmas. What struck me though was that it was an OLD card, with the kind of graphic on it that dated it to the 1940’s. And I’d never seen it before.

I do collect cards. I love them. I have a collection that goes back 30-40 years. I know my cards because I usually put them up someplace, using them like a boarder around doorways or up near the ceiling. Each and every one is dear to me, because often times the card came to me from family or close friends. But this one was a complete mystery because I had absolutely no recollection of buying it or receiving it. My second thought was that it came from my mom.

I did empty the crate before I placed it on the tank I knew darned well and good there was no little card either in it, or stuck to the side. I even wiped off the crate before I put it in the bathroom to use as a shelf. It is only Lew and I who live here, and Lew was not using that little bathroom very often and had nothing in there when I moved it, so I knew it wasn’t his. Of course I asked him when he came home from work that night. He didn’t recognize the card either.

Now my mom always had a rule that you had to do your chores before you could do anything you enjoyed, like reading or going outside to play. "Work first, then play" was her motto, and I thought she’d somehow slipped it underneath the box so I would not find it unless I was doing my housework. Kind of like a joke.

But I wonder, could it be that she slipped it through a space between universes and it came out where it did because of how the spirit world universe and our physical universe line up?

I don’t know the answer to that one. All I know is that before that day I’d never seen the card and it was mightily coincidental that I’d find it doing my “chores” and just after I had kind thoughts of her and her habit of sending little cards to remember the holidays.