It was a chilly winter’s night on Monday, February 12, 1973. I walked into my mother’s bedroom to find Mother and Grandma Donna packing a suitcase.

“Why are you packing?” I eagerly asked.

Mother knew what was truly behind my question. “It’s not time, yet, but I thought I needed to be ready.”

“But it’s close, right?”

“Yes.”

I wandered around her bedroom while she and Grandma chatted. On her long wooden Hope Chest was a large, thin brown paper sack. I normally did not nib through things in Mother’s room and fifty-two years later, still have no idea why I peeked into the sack.

“Are these for me?” I shrieked.

“Well, I was going to give them to you for Valentine’s Day.”

I pulled out two very large card prints of colored busts of President Lincoln and President Washington. For over a year, beginning on Lincoln’s birthday in 1972, I’d become a junior Lincoln scholar. Now, halfway through my second grade year at Washington Elementary School, I’d read every book in both the school library and the Elwood Public Library’s children’s department. Mother had even checked out the Lincoln books from the adult library.

It was good timing that I nibbed into the sack as Mother was not home that following Wednesday on Valentine’s Day. Grandma Donna woke me that morning for school to announce the birth of my new baby sister, Dena Linn.