I unwrapped that old hymnal page right there on the settee, and I had to sit down, because folded inside was a letter in my own mothers handwriting, and it was addressed to me.
My mother played that pump organ every Sunday for forty years. She died when I was still young, and I always felt I had lost her before I ever really knew her. And here, hidden in the back of the organ she loved, was a letter she had written and tucked away for the day the church finally closed and her child came looking.
She knew, she wrote, that she was sick, and that she likely would not see me grow up. So she did the only thing a dying mother at a pump organ could think to do. She wrote me a letter, and she hid it inside the one thing in the world she was sure I would come back to someday, the organ, the church, the place where I was raised and married.
My mother, knowing she was leaving a young child behind, spent her last strength writing me the mothering she would not live to give in person, and she hid it inside her organ, trusting that one day, when I was old and the little church closed, I would find her waiting there with everything she never got to say.
The letter was long. It told me she was proud of me before I had done a single thing to be proud of. It told me to marry a kind man, which I did. It told me that grief passes but love does not, and that when I sang the hymns she used to play, she would be singing them with me, wherever she was.
And it ended: I could not stay, my darling, but I could leave you this. Come find me at the organ when you are grey and I will still be your mother.
I am seventy-nine years old. I have waited my whole life for my mother to say something to me, and this week, from inside a hundred-year-old organ, she finally did.
I have the letter framed above the organ in my front room now. And on Sunday mornings I patch up the bellows enough to play, badly, the hymns my mother played, and I sing them, and I believe her, that she is singing them too.
I bought back the old church organ because the bellows leaked. It held a letter my dying mother wrote to the old woman I would someday become, and after seventy years I finally got to hear my mother tell me she loved me.