The green box

The green tissue paper had faded to an ugly greenish- gray. It had been a bright green when I folded it around the small milk carton. Fluffy white feathers were glued around the top. I remembered making this when I was in fifth grade. I saved my milk carton from school lunch and gathered the feathers on my way home from school. I filled the milk carton with cheerful yellow dandelions. This was my Mother’s Day gift for my grandmother—my mother’s mother. My mother was gone. Her death the previous February was still a fresh wound.

Now, eight years later, my grandmother was also gone. I stood in her bedroom and mourned her death. I looked at her neatly made bed and the pump organ that required two small girls to play it. My sister and I loved playing the organ. We took turns/ One of us pulled out the stops and played the keys while the other one knelt on the floor and pumped the foot pedals with her hands.

I walked over to the window and pulled aside the curtain. And there it was. After all these years the little milk carton basket still existed. The dandelions were long gone. The feathers were as fluffy and white as the day I pasted them in place. The tissue paper that covered it was a faded greenish-gray. But Grandma Dudley had kept it. My small gift had mattered to her.

It was almost seventy years ago that I gave this small gift, but the image of that little milk carton basket is still fresh in my mind. I remember how it looked when I gave it to my grandmother. I remember how it looked when I found it eight years later.  I am reminded that how much a gift costs or how elaborate it is don’t matter. The memory of that small basket symbolizes two gifts.  My gift to my grandmother was a gift of love. Her gift to me was also a gift of love.