Charlotte gives everything away

Money was tight when my husband’s parents married during the Depression. To afford what they needed for their house and five children they shopped at auctions. He bought tools and equipment. She came home with beds for their five children, a kitchen cabinet with chipped paint and dressers with cracked varnish.
Between changing diapers, scrubbing floors, making bread and canning, she stripped off paint, stain and varnish and sanded wood. They didn’t always have new, store bought goods, but everyone had a place to sleep, clothes to wear and plenty to eat. Over the years, she bought and refinished a piano, desks, corner cabinet and dining table with chairs.
As her children started their first homes — with used furniture — she volunteered to refinish the wooden pieces. Once, she refinished a dark stained, cracked varnish piano for me. She carefully detailed each step as he worked. She even let me help until I scrubbed too vigorously and damaged the patina. Each piece she refinished was very special to her.
Once she worked I detailed the emotional confusion after my grandmother’s unexpected death as relatives worked to distribute everything grandma had left behind. My mom-in-law listened — until I too boldly suggested that she should write down who would inherit what.
After we moved out of the area, her house became our haven for holiday visits. We slept in the four post high bed and ate meals from dishes stored in the cherry colored kitchen cabinet. When our children were young, I moved her most fragile antiques out of range of children and offered them instead the large wooden alphabet blocks their grandmother had played with as a child.
Last year the doctor looked at her solemnly. He said anything he would do to fix her latest ailment would curtail her quality of life and would not extend it.
She continued as she had for 84 years: Cooking, gardening and walking to town for groceries. In her 85th spring she asked folks to take her to the grocery store. During our summer visit, she watched while others harvested her garden.
At her 86th birthday party with her family gathered around, she announced it was time to distribute the furniture and household goods. Astonished her children moved through the house touching the beds, chest of drawers, glassed-in book cases and the old upright piano that were now theirs.
Having made her birthday announcement, she sat back, pleased to see her piano moved into her daughter’s house, the china cabinet taken to a son’s house and my husband packing up her old building blocks for his grandchildren to enjoy. By day’s end, her four-bedroom house had been emptied into the homes of her children and grandchildren. Her clothes, a bed, chair and dresser were moved to her daughter’s house where she welcomed visitors with the story of her 86th birthday when she gave away everything she had to the people she loved.