The Old Green Leather Wallet

I was cleaning out some things today and I came across my mom’s old green leather wallet.

The wallet she has had for decades. The wallet that is falling apart at the seams. The wallet we tried many times to replace for her – only to have her stick with the old green one she already had.

She liked the smaller size of it. She liked that it didn’t have too many pockets and slots for credit cards. She liked that it had softened with age and she liked that she knew where the treasured photos of her husband and children and grandchild were.

 

She also knew which compartment held the ratty card on which she’d written the phone numbers and addresses of those important to her.

I hadn’t looked in the wallet since mom moved in to her memory care unit nearly four years ago. When she first arrived, she carried her purse. Mom never went anywhere without it and moving to a memory care unit was no different. While I knew she wouldn’t need a purse there, I didn’t try to dissuade her from bringing it.

But we looked inside her wallet so I could take her ID and health care cards and any other important information she carried. The only money mom had in the wallet was a $10 dollar bill, which she handed to me.

“Well, I guess I won’t be needing this anymore, she said. “Why don’t you keep it, Jane?”

I was already an emotional wreck having to bring mom to this place that I knew she’d never leave, so the act of handing over the last little bit of cash in her wallet almost did me in. I had to excuse myself for a moment to recapture a little composure.

When I rejoined her, she’d already forgotten about her purse, the green wallet and the ten dollar bill.

So when I came across her wallet in my purging frenzy today, it stopped me dead in my tracks. I hadn’t looked inside that wallet for ages.

I carefully opened it up and inside that old wallet were the parts of one’s life that seem mundane – until the person no longer has any use for them.

Inside her change compartment were, yes, a few coins – but she also carried some bobby pins for her hair. That compartment also held a religious medal – the same medal that mom gave me from time to time in moments of strife.

She meant to give me some peace by sending me that small token – but whenever I see those medals, I think of mom.  And while it brings a little sadness, it also does bring me a sense of comfort.

Also in the change purse was a small polished green stone. I suspect she picked it up on one of their many trips around the world. But I don’t think we’ll ever really know why that stone had such significance that mom kept it in her wallet.

I removed her frequent shopper cards for a grocery store and several pharmacies in Alliance.  

The card she always carried for the grocery store in Wareham had already been discarded. It could be that dad took it out of her wallet when they sold the cottage at the Cape knowing they’d never need that card again.

For some reason, she carried dad’s library card in her wallet, although perhaps they both used just one card when they borrowed from the library.

Or perhaps with the advancement of her dementia mom lost her library card and rather than replace it, they simply used dad’s card.  

But seeing dad’s signature on the back of the card brought me to tears. So many memories came flooding back.

I remember going to the library with them as a child and later visiting the bookmobile on my own whenever it came around my neighborhood. I’d check out as many books as I was allowed and then I’d struggle to carry them home careful not to drop any of my treasures.

I am incredibly happy that my parents instilled a love of reading in all their children – so much so that sometimes when we’d all gather together, we would quietly spend time together reading or doing crossword puzzles or jumbles.

Sometimes we’d all be so still, someone would invariably say, “Aren’t we a lively bunch?!”

But it was a comfortable silence broken only by someone commenting on an interesting passage or someone else asking for an answer to the clue in the crossword puzzle.

Nowadays, people can gather together and quietly spend time scrolling or texting or YouTubing or whatever it is they’re doing on their phones, but that togetherness doesn’t seem to have quite the same camaraderie.

In later years, I’d drive my parents to the small library in Wareham. Vacations at the Cape meant I got to catch up on lots of reading and I’d check out as many of the new best sellers as I could manage in the time I had there.

Dad went from reading regular books, to reading Large Print books and then later still when macular degeneration was winning the war against his eyesight, he’d borrow books on tape.

Mom, meanwhile, transitioned from historical novels and biographies to cookbooks where she could read snippets of dishes she’d most likely never prepare. But she always liked looking at cookbooks.

Toward the end of their visits to the library Dad would help her choose travel books where she could look at the photos and he’d help her try to recapture some memories of her time spent in those locales.

Finally, inside that old green wallet were photos of her husband and her children growing up. Our high school graduation photos were in there and tucked behind them were one or two of our grade school photos.  She also kept several photos of her granddaughter, Chloe, whom she adored.

There was a small black and white photo of dad taken in April of 1953 in Winnipeg. Dad was nattily dressed in a bow tie and an overcoat smiling as he sat on some steps in front of a vast pillar.

Shortly after they returned from their honeymoon, he had been given orders to report to an Air Force station in Winnipeg, the capital of the Canadian province of Manitoba. In later years mom and dad both recounted stories of that time, with her travelling by train to the remote station and staying with him in housing with no running water. 

It was a picture of dad that I don’t think I’d ever seen before. And it made me nostalgic for times that had passed and can never be recaptured again.

Much as that old green wallet captured snippets of mom’s life. She will never relive those times again, but in looking through her wallet, I got to experience some of those special moments in her life – and ours, too.