About twice a month, I get a piece of Miss Laura’s mail. It’s been coming for over three years now. Miss Laura was the spinster-lady who lived in my duplex before me until she passed away. Her spinster-sister lived upstairs, and as near as I can glean from stories the neighbors tell, she died about five years before Miss Laura. (Believe me, I do see the irony here. My current upstairs neighbor is also a single woman – but I’m thinking there must be another way out!)

Her sister’s mail has stopped. But Miss Laura’s keeps coming.

There’s no family member to forward the mail to, and so I destroy it. But having collected it for quite a while – I’ve learned things about Miss Laura, even though we never met.

She was a supporter of the Houston Livestock Show & Rodeo, and probably a stockholder in two corporations (annual reports). I know which political party she favored – or the one she must have written at least one check to. She still gets two Christmas cards each year, so someone out there is as bad a list-keeper as I am – maybe worse. And she once ordered cosmetics from France that most certainly got lost in transit, since they arrived a good two years after her death.

It’s strange to have these odd reminders of Miss Laura on my doorstep. But I don’t want them to stop. Since there doesn’t seem to be anyone to remember her, I’m glad to do so every now and then.

Someday, someone will get my mail. And if they get it long enough, they’ll know things about me, too. They’ll know what catalogs I favored, and which magazines I read. They’ll see who didn’t remove me from their Christmas card list, and when my dog was due for shots.

Even if I don’t leave a family behind, I hope there’ll be more than just my mail to be remembered by.

I hope someone keeps my love of words, and takes my books and journals and notebooks out every now and then to peruse their pages. I hope the box of recipes in my kitchen (some of them in my grandmother’s handwriting) finds its way into another cook’s hands, and results in years of lovely smells and nourishing meals. I hope I leave true laughter, and deep insight, and bits and pieces of bright, blazing truth that someone tucks away and saves.

But most of all, I want to leave plenty of Jesus, and of His joy. And I want that to keep coming, over and over again, just the way it’s come to me.

And He said to them, “Therefore every scribe who has become a disciple of the kingdom of heaven is like a head of a household, who brings forth out of his treasure things new and old.” (Matthew 13:52, NASB)

© Leigh McLeroy 2004