My favorite estate sale find.

It's an odd and wonderful treasure.

A few years ago, I acquired one of the best things I’ve ever found at an estate sale.

We followed the signs on our way home from church. It was the last day of the sale. Needless to say, there wasn’t much left, and we ended our tour in the home office, pawing through bags of paperclips, pens, pencils, and a box of paper goods (I love office supplies).

Mixed in with the notebooks and empty file folders, I found a clutch of handwritten pages. The writing was so small that I couldn’t quite tell what it was about, but I was instantly intrigued. I searched the box for every page and inquired about them.

“I found these papers in the office,” I said, “Do you know what they are?”

“It’s Grandma’s life story,” the woman tending the sale replied. “You can have it.”

Why would she give away her grandma’s life story? I asked if she was sure she didn’t want it, and she assured me she did not. I was both shocked and thrilled.

I went home and began to investigate. Did I have all the pages? I found tiny numbers in the upper left-hand corner of each page, and I had pages 1-43 (both sides covered in cursive) … the story ended on page 43. Hallelujah! It appeared to be a complete volume. The author counted every single word on each page, writing the number in the margin. The end count was 77,000 words!

Now, to read Grandma’s story. At first, it seemed like a life story. A boy and a girl growing up on the same street, falling in love, but separated when the boy goes off to college. When she switched to the young man’s point of view, though, she knew his thoughts and conversations with people the girl couldn’t know. It was then that I realized it probably wasn’t Grandma’s life story. Was it a novel, instead, or perhaps her story written in novel form? Maybe she wrote what she thought happened when she wasn’t there. The two lovers married other people; her husband wasn’t good to her, and they eventually divorced. I couldn’t get through the entire thing. It wasn’t just the tiny script, but Grandma wrote in an antiquated style that was difficult to follow—no paragraphs, little to no punctuation, and an omniscient point of view that jumped around endlessly.

It was written during a time of scarcity, perhaps during or after the Great Depression or World War II. Grandma had a limited amount of paper to work with, and as I read, the handwriting became smaller and smaller … and smaller. She wrote in perfect cursive (also hard to decipher) with only a few mistakes! Several pages were written in ink.

The story may be hard to read, but what makes it a treasure is the author's immense effort and the handwritten perfection. My goodness, how could you write so small, so straight—on unlined paper—without mistakes? Amazing.

So many questions swirled in my mind. How long did it take to fill 43, or rather, 86 pages with her story? Weeks? Months? Years? Did she spend a lot of time thinking before she wrote to avoid mistakes? Was it her story or fiction? Did she ever try to have the manuscript published? And who is Grandma?

I protect each page of the volume in a sleeve and keep it on a shelf in my studio. When I need a nudge of encouragement, I peruse the artful pages, reminding myself that I’m blessed to have a computer with which to write. This novel inspires me to keep going when I’m stuck. If a mysterious grandma can write a novel by hand, with limited resources, surely I can do it with ease on my laptop.

This estate sale treasure also reminds me to do whatever my hands find to do with all my heart. (Ecclesiastes 9:10) Grandma surely did.

Below is a video of a flip-through of the manuscript. Note the tiny script on the final pages. It’s amazing!