A bag full of stones

Thursday evenings were saved for Meme and Pepe, our French-Canadian bonus grandparents, Meme, petite and hard around the edges, with boney-fingered cheek pinches and endless smiles for the children I only now realize filled a giant void in her life, a void left by the very early death of my older brothers’ father. Our Pepe was softer. Taller. Kindness and gentle humor filled his deeply accented voice and manner. He was always formal, dressed in full suit and tie at any time I can remember save when he was fishing and comfortable and perhaps only then truly at ease in the cabin they summered at on a little New Hampshire lake.

Thursdays my mother worked with my father in his law office downtown. Meme and Pepe would arrive around supper, usually just as we were finishing up, something simple like American Chop Suey or open-faced hamburg sandwiches.They arrived laden with ‘stuff’, every week. Bags carried stamps for our collections, colorful papers filled with foreign images and exotic places, and hidden deep in the compartments of our Meme’s pocketbook were Sprint bars, the predecessor to the Kit Kat bar. And every week they were there, their deliciousness just waiting for our greedy hands to seek them out and stuff our faces. Which we did. Happily. Every week.

We spent hours each week with our grandparents, adding to our stamp collections, adhering tiny corners to our pages and inserting both spent and unspent stamps, beautiful art and historical landmarks and illustrations from all over the world. I’ve always loved to travel, in part because my mother impressed upon us the importance of such adventure, but likely also fed by the Thursday night images of far-away lands and impossibly foreign ideas. 

Stamps were a conduit for our time spent together. The collections gave us a focus for our evenings, a hobby to share not only with Meme and Pepe, but with each other. They provided a framework for our evenings, a focal point for discussion, and a landing space for when we just wanted to be together. The hobby itself didn’t matter, only that there was one. I overlooked this until very recently, the importance of such an activity in providing a structure.

One Thursday, Meme and Pepe arrived with new treasures. They had visited Ruggles Mine at some point during the week, and they arrived with actual jewels just for us, small stones of every color, polished to a perfectly imperfect shine. We sorted and traded and filled small leather bags with treasures. My little pink leather drawstring bag held amethyst, tiger’s eye, onyx and jade. I can still feel their cold brilliance, the smooth surfaces and the rounded edges, see the stripes of the tiger’s eye and the indenture in the purple amethyst. I stored this pink bag in my room for years, and when I moved away, it came with me, a treasure not only in its own beauty, but in the memories it held. And with every move, I would come across the bag and the stones, and I’d rub them to conjure the memories of Thursday nights with Meme and Pepe. Only recently have I realized I have no idea what became of those stones and the little pink bag. 

But the memories remain, and they, after all, are the true treasures.