The Light We Strike Against the Cold

Lately, I have been thinking a lot about what we leave behind.

I’m not talking about money or possessions, although those have their place. I mean the ordinary things that carry the stories of who we were. The things that pass from one pair of hands to another, holding memories long after we’re gone.

Lately, I’ve been taking apart a vintage European chandelier that lived in my home for decades, giving its crystals a second life instead of letting them disappear into a landfill. I’ve been spending hours researching century-old postcards, trying to learn who wrote them, where they travelled, and who waited for them to arrive. I’ve been writing down family stories before my memory softens around the edges.

And today, I took on another project: having my favourite childhood fairy tale book, The Fairy Tale Treasury – In Living Colour, carefully restored and rebound.

It has travelled with me for almost sixty years.

It has moved through five homes, marriages and divorces, years of rebuilding, and more than one beginning again.

I received it as a birthday gift in January 1968. My name and the year are still written inside the front cover in my careful childhood handwriting.

The binding is beginning to fail. The original hand-sewn stitching has deteriorated over nearly six decades, causing the cover to separate and several pages to come loose.

Of course, I could buy another copy online.

But it wouldn’t be my copy.

It wouldn’t have the worn pages I turned over again and again. It wouldn’t have the fingerprints that found their way onto the cover over nearly sixty years. It wouldn’t have travelled with me from childhood, through my college years, into motherhood, and now into grandmotherhood.

My favourite story was always The Little Match Girl.

I hadn’t thought about it in years—not really, not beyond the warm blur that childhood memories eventually settle into. But sitting with the book again, I remembered exactly how it made me feel.

A little girl is out in the freezing cold, alone, trying to sell matches that no one wants to buy. She is afraid to go home, so she lights the matches one by one, just for a moment of warmth. Each tiny flame gives her a vision: a glowing stove, a feast, a Christmas tree, and finally her grandmother, the one person who had always been gentle with her. In that last light, her grandmother lifts her up and carries her somewhere warm.

I think I loved that story as a child because, despite its sadness, it was filled with hope. The little girl never stopped imagining that something warm and beautiful might be waiting for her.

I think I love it now because it reminds me that even in the darkest moments, we must keep dreaming.

Sometimes hope is the small light we strike against the cold.

As I sat there holding that worn old book, it occurred to me that maybe this is what I’ve been doing all along.

With the chandelier crystals. With the postcards. With the family stories.

Taking things that could easily disappear and giving them another chance to carry their warmth forward.

Perhaps this is what growing older does. It changes the question from What can I acquire? to What can I preserve?

Maybe one day, someone in my family will open this fairy tale book. Maybe my granddaughter will keep it in her home and carry it with her throughout her life—from house to house, through relationships, motherhood, and all the chapters still waiting for her.

Maybe one day, her children, or her children’s children, will hold it in their hands and wonder what life was like in 1968, and who Mary Ann was.

I hope they will feel something of me still there—in my name written inside the cover, in the worn pages, and in the knowledge that I carried this book with me for so much of my life.

They will never know the little girl named Mary Ann who first held this book in her hands, or all the places it travelled with her. But perhaps they will know something about her through the things she chose to save.

I think I might tuck a little note inside for all the children still to come, telling them that this book once belonged to a six-year-old girl who loved stories, kept dreaming, and carried it with her for the rest of her life.

And if that little note is still there, and someone pauses to read it—

for just a moment,

I will still be there.

.

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