I returned from my granddaughter's graduation from William and Mary with a Mother's Day carnation, a gift from the restaurant where we celebrated.  It was evening when I returned home and I went straight to my china closet to select a vase.

A slender porcelain vase caught my eye.  It had been my mother's and I was glad to notice it on this second Mother's Day without her.

Kathleen and Jean Ferrick with the tiny Dutch shoe.

My mother was famous for forever making notes on whatever paper was handy.  Small note-sized pieces, even scraps, would have memos about what time her brother arrived to play Scrabble, what their respective scores were, what time he left.  My mother should have been a reporter - no factual detail was too minute to escape her pen.

I wondered what I might read on the wadded up paper.  Knowing she never kept what I would consider a diary, with feelings about life or even happenings, I wasn't excited about what I might see, just curious.  That was about to change.

Puzzled, I removed the
carnation and peered into the vase.  A small wad of paper sat at the bottom.

In the center of layers of napkins, it turned out, was a tiny shoe.  Not just any tiny shoe but a tiny, green, ceramic Dutch shoe with a history.

I was perhaps five years old when my father took me to Newberry's Five and Dime and watched me walk down a wide stairway ending in front of a wall of knickknacks.  It was there that I found that tiny  Dutch shoe for my Mum.  It was the first present I remember giving her.  Over the years I would see it move with her and always be displayed.  I gave her another, much larger Dutch shoe in later years, just for fun.  Eventually, I gave her a small gold shoe that she wore on a necklace.

My sister and I had packed up her belongings that we would keep and I brought home a box with small items that sat in my garage until I felt ready to see them again.  Earlier this spring I unpacked the box and placed the vase in the china closet.

Finding it made my Mother's Day complete in a whole new way.  It was the first time I ever received a gift from my mother on Mother's Day.  And that's exactly what I believe happened.

Jean Loxley-Barnard has been a writer all her life and studied both sociology and psychology at George Washington University where she earned a B.A. Her company, The Shopper, Inc., encompasses all the Loxley-Barnard family publications - The Shopper Magazines and Doctor to Doctor Magazine. She has been in the advertising, consulting and publishing business for 39 years.