The one thing you treasure

[foxyknoxy30]

Of course we all have various things we treasure but above everything I treasure is the last Christmas card my mum wrote for me and my family last December.She was ill and passed away on the 4th of January but still managed to write me one. I keep the card beside me at my bedside drawer and pull it out just to see her writing still with the original envelope.So what do you treasure big or small and why?

I've a similar birthday card from my Dad, it's the last one he wrote me, perfect handwriting and a wee joke which surmises my lasting happy thoughts of him. It's by my bookshelf in my bedroom with a lovely photo of him in it.

Bump

Two rings my nan gave me. I don’t wear them but keep them safely in a box and get them out frequently to look at.

I have a ring bought by work colleagues. It has the birthstone of my stillborn DD

A torn off scrap of paper with my then one-night-stand now DH's email address on it. If I hadn't got that, no DH, no DD...

I can not narrow it down to one item I have,
DMs wedding ring that I was married with
DDs chain
Bracelet with DHs ashes in.

My mum's hand-written recipe book, complete with smudges and floury fingerprints and crossings-out and cut-out recipes from Bella magazine. All the lovely foods of my childhood, and a big section in the back full of vegetarian recipes that made me realise, far too late, how much of an effort she made to learn a completely new way of cooking when I stopped eating meat at the age of 11.

My maternal grandfather was a diligent and methodological man, and when he died we found a leather bound notebook on one of his bookshelves. Inside were pages and pages of monthly dates going back over forty years, each with odd sentences beside them: so “1982 February - Gold mining in Peru; Cheetahs of Persia; Amazon destruction. 1982 March - Aboriginal people of Papua New Guinea; Dinosaurs rediscovered; Chinese agrarian economy; Comets and weather.” And so in and so forth for years of dates.

My mum and I puzzled over what on earth this notebook was about, until it finally clocked - he’d subscribed to National Geographic magazine for most of his adult life and each month he would carefully record the key articles for each issue, is that if he wanted to go back and read about something again he could refer to his notebook and find out which issue to look out.

I treasure this notebook because it embodies my grandfather perfectly and tells everything anyone would need to know about the kind of man he was