I have always liked the word grace but felt like the true definition of it always slipped through my fingers, that is until I heard a story from a woman I knew in my writers group. This was an assembly of older women who had all been foreign officer’s wives, and whose age you can gage by the fact that I was the ‘cute young thing’ at 65.
This particular woman had escaped from Czechoslovakia with her parents just before the Nazi take-over of that country prior to World War II. In her difficult travels through Europe on her way east, she met her future husband, who had been an anti-Nazi in Austria and was also escaping east. They fell in love and married in Portugal before sailing for the haven of the United States.
Both became American citizens, and it was while serving in Paris for that government that this story unfolded. My friend was having afternoon tea at a neighbor’s home when invited to view a desk that she had just purchased in an antique store in that city. My friend said she walked into the room and was overcome for a moment. It was her grandmother’s desk that had stood in the study in her country home in Czechoslovakia. To be sure she pretended to admire the purchase and pulled out one of the little drawers where her initials were still secretly scratched, done by rebellious eight-year-old self. “My grandmother was very autocratic, and I just wanted to leave my mark somewhere in her home” she commented.
Stunned by the story we all clamored to know what the new desk-owner had to say when she told her what she had just bought. She looked surprised. “I could not tell her.” There was a long pause and then, “That would have ruined her pleasure in her purchase and not brought back a moment of my childhood.”
And that is grace.