With each embroidered stitch...

The Rest is history.
As the prequel to my Goodies from Home post, I simply must share another lovely gift I was given. My grandma is going through a dispersing phase, as one may call it. She knows she is not getting any younger and I feel like every time we visit, she digs up something new from the loot that she has collected over her 83 wonderful years. Well, you know how that goes, grandmas are grandmas and they keep EVERYTHING. Pack rat. Accumulator. Saver. Gatherer - what have you. Although it could be seen as clutter, I see it as amazing antiquity full of thousands of stories and memories just waiting to be shared..as confirmed by my last visit home. My grandma, with a thought in her mind and a stack of hand-embroidered towels in her hand, sat down at the table, next to me. I noticed a very old ribbon in her other hand and knew these towels were unlike the many that I had seen before. Still crisp white from being immaculately stored in the hope chest, she said to me, "I was done with school when I was 12, I was so bored that I would read anything (including farm magazines) I could get my hands on."

My grandma, like many when she was young, was out of school early and helped on the farm. She said she entered these towels in the county fair and has the ribbon to prove it. "My sister told me that these towels were to be made from good flour sacks, so if I was going to sew on them, the stitches had to be nice and tight, see how tight those stitches are?"

After all these years, I could still see the beaming pride on her face. She turns to me and says, "Take one, I have no use for them anymore." With a large smile on my face, I gladly accepted her offer. As I think to myself, "This means more than you will ever know." Little did she know, as a self-teaching, 12 year old - those annoyingly tight stitches will keep her memory in our hearts for years, and years, to come.