“Don’t go upstairs empty handed!”

Mom! Three little letters that absolutely fill my heart with love. For the record I had the bestest Mom in the universe! I will also tell you that I miss her terribly.

Instead of feeling sad today for Mother’s Day I decided to do a couple of things by myself that my Mom and I would have been doing together once upon a time.

 

I went to Blue Subur Market in Sitges and did a little shopping. She and I loved visiting little unique shops and finding something we just couldn’t live without. We always ended up buying each other gifts while shopping together. When I would visit her in Grass Valley, California we had a few shops that we had to go to while I was there. Mom and daughter time.

After a little shopping I wandered down to the beach…she loved the beach. We would walk and talk and collect seashells together. It would have been nice to do that with her today.

But I said I wasn’t going to feel sad today. Just think happy memories of my best friend.

I’ve been thinking of all the Momisms today. Things she taught me. Things she said. I’ve been reminded many times since we moved to our home in Spain of her wise words.  Well, instructions/rules more like. When we were growing up things would be placed at the foot of the staircase that needed to be brought upstairs. My Mom did not need to be in the living room to know we were going upstairs. It was the Mom all-seeing-all -knowing magic. As soon as we placed one foot on the bottom step she would call out…”Don’t go upstairs empty handed!”

A couple of months ago I was looking through my “Mom” email folder and came across an email from 2012. I told her that whenever I went upstairs I always heard her voice in my head saying, “Don’t go upstairs empty handed!” I asked if this childhood memory was true. This was her reply:

“That was a Grandmomism.  We always put things to go upstairs on the landing at home, so when anyone went up we were supposed to take things with us. We said the same in Redding and anywhere else we had stairs. In both cases it didn’t work all the time.”

Now this may seem like a weird thing to write about except that we now live in a house with a wine cellar. When heading upstairs to the living room at the end of the day Bob and I will ask “do we need wine upstairs?” This always makes me giggle because I hear my Mom’s voice say, “Don’t go upstairs empty handed!”

She must have known that some day I would live in a house with a wine cellar. She must have been training me to always bring wine upstairs.

Let’s face it…Mom’s know everything! Happy Mother’s Day!