...the Journals.. a second post for today....

When I was in high school, my Great Aunt Jane (my dad's aunt) came to visit one holiday season.
While she was with us, she gave me my grandmother's journals from when she was a young woman.
I never met that grandmother, my dad's mother, as she died from metastatic breast cancer in 1953.
The black-bound composition books were little treasure chests, with pictures, and letters, and other mementos glued to the pages, and the glimpses of her life in the nineteen teens in Virginia and Chicago, where she went to college, and eventually met my grandfather.
Anyway, I had those journals for several years, until my dad's youngest sister, Judy, came to visit (from AR, where she was living at the time) while one of their cousins, with whom Judy was very close, was dying.  
From breast cancer.
Judy asked about the journals, and asked to borrow them.
I gave them to her gladly, of course. She said she would send them to me when she finished with them.
A reasonable, to me, amount of time went by, and I asked when I could expect the journals to be returned to me.
My aunt abjectly, and clearly, refused to give them back.
I implored, I begged, and I asked her daughters to help me, but she would not part with them. 
She had taken them back to AR with her, and I could not have them. Period.
She felt that they were HERS by right, not mine, even though her aunt, who had held them for decades, gave them to ME.
(there is much more to the story, but I won't add it to this post--if you're curious, you can scroll back to my post about her from last June)
When I moved to Oklahoma, Aunt Judy was, coincidentally, living here also, along with one of her daughters (who still lives here).
When I arrived, I visited my aunt once. She was happy to have me visit, and made us a pan of her famous brownies....but, other than that, she was not overly welcoming. I offered to be available to her, to help her with her house and her animals, but she never took me up on it.
We did not speak of the journals.
She eventually moved back to her beloved Colorado.
She would write to me, and send me cards, and always said she loved me. She referred to herself as "Auntie J," though none of us ever called her that, to my knowledge.
She was very concerned and supportive of me with my cancer battle..... But we never spoke of the journals again.
She eventually passed away, and Dave and I went to Colorado for her memorial in June of 2017.
At the end of the gathering, when we were all leaving, my cousin handed me a bag.
The journals, and a couple of photographs of my dad, were in the bag.
I wept as she handed them to me.
I have not yet felt ready to open the journals, until today.
I wanted to make a photo collage for Christmas, to help me remember why I order that dang ham every year, and why I do the things that I do in order to touch my roots at this season of the year.
I knew that the photos were in the bag with the journals. Untouched since last year, I opened the bag.
I wept.
I made my photo collage, with those and other photos.
And I started reading.......