I wish she knew I found the comic strips

I wish she knew I found the comic strips.

It started with her reading me the antics of a dog and cat in a newspaper cartoon over the phone every day.  The dog reminded her of my basset-beagle mix who was one of the sweetest souls that have walked this planet, and the cat reminded her of my cat, Sammy, who was one of the angriest.

She would describe each pane in great detail so I could picture their movements and facial expressions to match the words.  She was oddly talented at describing comic strips.  I cared marginally for the story but found her excitement to be the real entertainment.

Eventually, she stopped reading them, because she wanted me to see them instead.  She spent the next year cutting each one out of the newspaper and giving them to me in small batches.

It drove me crazy.

I kept telling her to just read them to me.  I told her I don't have time to sit down and read fifty comics strips at once.  I told her I didn't know what to do with all these scraps of paper that were finding their way into all of my drawers and books and bags.  I even found one in a kleenex box.  

I pleaded, but she didn't stop, and she said she wanted me to have them.  She asked continuously if I had read the most recent batch, and I would say no, until eventually, I would say yes, just to make her happy.  

Either that or I said it to make her stop asking.

Until recently, when I was cleaning out the drawers in my office, and I found a Ziploc bag, smelling faintly of patchouli, which was always her scent and a story of its own.  In the bag was a whole collection of comic strips.

Suddenly the scraps of paper didn't feel like they were in my way.  They did not feel inconvenient.  They felt like a quirky mother who wanted to share something that made her laugh.  They felt like love.  Still strange.  But love.  And I put them on my bookshelf to one day be read as she intended.

I wish she knew I would wear her ring

I wish she knew I would wear her ring. 

The one she gave me of discolored turquoise and dented silver.  Her hands had become too swollen to wear treasures from her younger days, and I simply smiled, said, 'Thank you," and put the ring in my jewelry box. 

The day after she died I put it on, and I wished I had worn it every day she was alive.  So maybe she could have known it really did mean something to me.  That something she found to be beautiful and a part of her youth didn't live the rest of its life locked in a dusty box.  That I thought it was beautiful too.

Not because it is.  But because it was to her.