Brighter Days

Every new year, Nana used to say, is like a new book with blank pages. Fill them well.

She was taking down the Christmas decorations, coiling up lights for storage and packing each little piece of her treasured Christmas village in cotton. The tree sat forlornly on the sidewalk but the house still smelled of fir and chocolate chip cookies. She poured left over eggnog into small sherry glasses for one last holiday toast, then we began carrying boxes to her well organized and spotless attic. No one I knew except my grandmother routinely cleaned and dusted their attic but Nana couldn't abide the thought of disarray, not even in a lonely and forgotten third floor room where no one ever went. Even the tiny windows were windex'd to a clear shine and the January sun poured through and over the neatly arranged shelves stacked with suitcases, hat boxes, fur coats in plastic zipper bags, books, abandoned lamps and file boxes of old Christmas cards. There were several stacks of old Life magazines, an egg beater complete with a set of mixing bowls, a trunk of linens, an old timey, free standing radio, photo albums, a pair of rocking chairs, several footstools with delicately embroidered tops. In one corner there was a mannequin wearing a black, low cut formal dress and a single strand of pearls. The room reeked of past lives and different times, of years when my grandmother was young and turning up her nose at sensible shoes and nostalgia filled attic rooms. This was a place of buried treasures and memories, a lost and found of brighter days, Glenn Miller recordings, a small jewelry box with a rusty clasp containing a bracelet made of heartshaped blue stones. Come, Nana told me with a tug on my sleeve, It's time for lunch. Leave this.

Over grilled cheese sandwiches and tomato soup at the tiny kitchen table, she was silent, almost thoughtful, but when I asked if anything was wrong she shook her head and reminded me to finish my milk. I left her sitting there with her coffee and Kent 100's and a faraway look. It was hard to imagine her as anything other than what she
was - a sturdy, stocky white haired matron in an apron and bifocals - efficient, demanding, unsentimental and practical to the final degree with a disdain for self pity or self indulgence. I assumed she had come into the world that way with her brighter days behind her and had never considered the possibility that she might've been young or carefree or in love and filled with promise.

Never give up on the hope of better and brighter days.