Finally got busted!

I've sometimes wondered how I would feel the day that my grandchildren discovered my writings. Though this has been a journal always intended as a gift to them someday when I am no longer around, there has always been the risk that one of them would happen upon these stories one day. It's happened.

Arrived home from my weekend in Mendocino to find a message among the spam that had collected that started with the words ... "was reading your blog and ..." which meant that someone was writing in response to my blog. The user name was not familiar. The signature jogged my memory and I grinned to myself as I saw but a few loving words,

" ... just ran into your blog, Grandma, and I want you to know how proud I am of you. I love you!

signed,

"Harmony Ginglehopper"

She'd found me. This was my twenty-something granddaughter. I remembered that when she was a very little girl I'd sent her a note (or a birthday card, maybe?) that was addressed to

"Miss Hermione Ginglehopper"

She was such a little girl. How on earth could she have remembered? Yet she had. And here we are a grandmother looking at 84 this year and a mature young woman in her twenties. And even these many years later, this bit of whimsey was still at work making magic. We never know what will be retained, do we? I don't believe that we ever spoke of that card or that silly little name game, but it had been tucked away in that place where children place such things -- to be brought out lo these many decades later to serve as a deep love connection that has defied time.

And these pages will serve to introduce her to a woman she's rarely been allowed to see. And she will now become a part of my story, with little fear that I will invade her privacy. I'm afraid that I know as little about her life as she's been allowed to know about mine. That's the life process, and follows the pattern that kept my mother's life a mystery to me, except for that which bled through the distance between us.

There is so little that I've lived that will hold any relevance to the world that she will grow into. The rate of change has speeded up to the point that "Miss Ginglehopper" will inherit one that I struggle very hard to read. But through it all, there may be a word or phrase here and there that may provide some landmarks that will help her better read her own.

I so love you, Sweetie! Welcome to these pages, and I sincerely hope that you'll find yourself here somewhere. You've surely been one of the souls to whom I've been speaking since these pages were started a few years ago.

Hope that I've made the case for what it means to be me ...

Maybe there will be something here that will help you to better understand just what it means to be you. Buried somewhere inside "Miss Ginglehopper" are the genes, the DNA, of the woman who lives behind my eyes; as I carry the genes, the DNA, of all of the family women who came before us both.

That's an awesome thought, isn't it?

And finally we have an instance where that overused word does not overstate the point.


(Photo: "Miss Ginglehopper" )