Part 3 — Hazels Frozen Keepsakes
The bottom package was the largest, wrapped in three layers of white butcher paper. My hands were numb. Uncle Dwight stood behind me, his voice soft, saying, Jolene, honey, let me explain before you open that. I said, I have waited forty-five years, Dwight. I am opening it now.
Inside was a wedding dress. Ivory satin, yellowed with age, perfectly folded and frozen in a block of ice crystals. Pinned to the collar was a card in Hazels shaky hand. For Rose Ellen Tackett, my daughter, when she comes home. Rose Ellen was my mother, and the name on the card was not Hazel, but her own.
I sat on the garage floor and finally understood the packages. Every year since 1979, when my mother left town, Hazel had put something into that freezer. A birthday cake from each year, a pair of baby shoes, a school photograph, every letter my mother sent. She had wrapped everything and dated it to preserve it, in case her daughter ever came back and wanted to know.
The blue vinyl purse with the license was my mothers, left behind on purpose the night she ran. She had been twenty-two, and in trouble with a man who frightened her, and she left in a hurry. Hazel never reported her missing, because she knew exactly where she was. She had been told never to say.
My mother had gone to Oregon, changed her name, and married a decent man. Hazel kept the secret out of a promise, and out of fear that the man would come looking. She mailed her letters to a post office box for forty years. She never told me, because my mother begged her to wait until the danger had passed.
My grandmother kept every year of my mothers absence in ice, because love that has nowhere to go will find something to hold.
Uncle Dwight handed me a thick envelope. It held my mothers current address in Eugene, and a note from Hazel saying, When I am gone, call her. She is alive, and she has wanted to hear your voice since the day you were born. I could hardly dial. The phone rang four times.
A woman answered. I said my name, and for a full ten seconds she said nothing. Then she said, Jolene Marie, is it really you? She was seventy-one and crying so hard I had to wait. We talked for three hours that night, and I told her about the bus route and the kids who called me Miss Jo.
I flew out the following week, with the dress in a garment bag. My mother looked at it and laughed through tears. She had never worn it. She had planned to marry my father in it and never could. She asked if I would take it for my daughter, and I said, we will see.
The freezer is empty now, and humming quietly. Each package has been moved to a shelf in my mothers sunroom, and we open one every Sunday and tell the story behind it. Hazels padlock is on my kitchen windowsill, with the shoelace key beside it, as a reminder of how far a grandmother will go.