It’s not unusual for many of us mothers and grandmothers to have memory boxes. We each may call them something different, but they all share a commonality—housing the precious keepsakes from our own lives and those of our children and grandchildren.
My filled-to-the-brim box occupies a sacred spot in my closet, giving me the opportunity when I feel nostalgic or crave genuine joy to dig through it. Recently, I came across a personal essay I banged out 40 years ago. In reading it now, I was caught by surprise at how life comes full circle. Here’s a snippet:
We had the same roof over our heads—even before we were born. Together, inside the soft, moist flesh of our mother’s womb, we floated in her warmth. Born five minutes apart, my brother and I since birth have shared just about everything in a time sequence, which for twins is not surprising, just special . . . from dating to driving lessons, becoming engaged within one month of each other to getting married three months apart, to moving into our first one-bedroom apartments within a block’s distance in Brooklyn.
Now more than 25 years into our intertwined lives, it’s befitting that I recall our beginnings as we each search for another new roof—this time, a dream house that will bring home the inevitable reality that physically my twin and I will never again be just a heartbeat away.
As we began exploring neighborhoods, costs, and proximity to work, it became clear that we were heading in opposite directions, possibly different states. Deep inside stirred a silent, selfish wish that our individual house hunts would go on forever—just so there could be one more spontaneous dinner, one more unexpected knock at the door late at night.
Ultimately, my twin brother and I both bought houses on Long Island, but they were 45 minutes from each other. It wasn’t the proximity I had longed for, especially given Long Island traffic although we’ve stayed incredibly close since.
The next generation came along. My two daughters, Corrine and Alyssa, were born three years apart—not the twins I had anticipated nor anticipated when they each had their own two children (no twins!).
When my adult daughters and their husbands outgrew their first apartments, the couples began looking for suburban homes. My oldest Corrine and her husband were first to unlock the door of their new house in 2013—a flipped split level in Nassau County. A few years later, my younger daughter Alyssa and her husband toyed with the idea of a house when my son-in-law’s medical residency miraculously brought him to Long Island.
As luck would have it, in 2017, they secured a house that had been rebuilt from the studs up: a split level flipped by the same contractor that flipped Corrine’s house. And it happened to be diagonally across the street from Corrine.
When I tell people where my girls live, their reactions are typically the same, “You must have done something right as a mother!” Beaming, I feel like perhaps I can take part of the credit. They had witnessed my closeness with my siblings, like I had with my mother and her siblings, including twins who shared a two-family home. Like my mom did to me, I drilled into them, “Family is everything.”
For me, as an on-call mother and grandmother, the logistics certainly made life easier. If I was babysitting at Alyssa’s house and Corrine needed me to take her son off the school bus, I could get him within seconds. The stop was right in front of Alyssa’s house! If I slept over at one of their houses, I could dash over in my PJs to have breakfast with my other set of grandchildren.
Barely a day passed when the sisters, brothers-in-law, or cousins weren’t at each other’s house. Often, my then 3-year-old grandson would want to stop first after daycare at “Aunt Red” before setting foot in his own house. The number of times they had impromptu meals together and borrowed things from each other is countless. So much so that one Mother’s Day I bought my girls slip-on (identical, tie-dye) sneakers to quickly get from one house to the next.
This scenario played out for about five years. Then, it was time for another phase in my son-in-law’s medical training. A surgical fellowship match landed him in Manhattan. Yes, I was thankful they would be less than an hour’s car ride away. But I was sad that these two families would no longer be so near at hand.
The day the moving truck pulled out of Alyssa’s driveway with her own “box” amidst a myriad of belongings, I couldn’t hold back tears that such a wonderful contiguous arrangement—a precious era—was ending.
Who knows where Alyssa and her family will end up when fellowship ends. My ray of hope: they rented rather than sold their house. So, if everything falls into place again, they could be back on the block, and my daughters could be slipping on their identical sneakers and knocking on each other’s doors to make more memories for all of us.
by Carolyn Moore 
by Melinda Tietsort 
by Cindy Farr 
