Carry Her Heart Read Online Free

of someone else? What if I gave you to parents who longed for a child and had the time, experience, and the income to give you a childhood like mine?
What if I was as strong as my great-grandmother Rose? My parents have given me her name as a middle name. Piper Rose George.
She was my grandfather’s mom and he’d told me her story countless times when I was younger. He’d told it to me so often that it felt like it was as much my story as his and hers.
Grandpa used to say I was the spitting image of his mother. “Her hair was as red as a cherry tomato,” he’d tell me.
My great-grandmother Rose grew up in an Irish family with too many children and too little money. She married my great-grandfather when she was only sixteen. He was a blacksmith and made a comfortable living. They had my grandfather and seemed to be on the road to a happily-ever-after. But when their baby—my grandfather—was only two months old, his father was kicked in the head by a horse and died two days later.
Rose went to work in a hotel as a maid to support herself and my grandfather. Grandpa was shuffled around from one set of relatives to another.
When he was five, Rose made a decision to give him up in order for him to have a better life. The life she’d dreamed for him.
I’ve imagined how hard it must have been to put her five-year-old son on a ship to America. To send him to live with an older sister my great-grandmother hardly remembered. An older sister, Nettie, who’d never married and told Rose in her letters that she longed for a child . . . not a husband, just a child.
Rose wanted her son to have the best. In addition to longing for a child, her sister worked at a school. Nettie promised Rose my grandfather would have the best education, and she would raise him and love him as if he were her own son.
So Rose sent Grandpa on that ship to a country she’d never seen and a sister she didn’t remember and only knew through letters.
    I stood up and set the journal down on my chair. The deep reds and orange of the embers were fading and I was once again aware of the music of my garden. It sounded like a whisper.
    I’d pictured Rose sending my grandfather away so many times when I was pregnant, and I’d marveled at her strength. I wanted to be as strong as she’d been.
    I sat back down and picked up the journal.
     
I imagined that scene a hundred times. A busy dock in front of a huge ship. In my mind, it looked like the Brig Niagara —the famous ship from the Battle of Lake Erie. Its replica was present-day Erie’s pride and joy. I know that the ship my grandfather took would have been more modern than that, but still, I saw the Niagara when I pictured the scene.
I could see Rose kneeling next to Grandpa, hugging him to her. Kissing his forehead. Trying to make him know to his core that even though she was sending him away, he was loved.
In my mind’s eye, she took her locket from around her neck and slipped it around his. My grandfather had left me that locket when he passed away. Inside was a picture of Rose and her blacksmith husband.
Rose sent it across an ocean with my grandfather, wanting to be sure he never forgot where he came from.
Needing to know he would never forget he was loved.
Rose continued to work at the hotel. Every month she sent Nettie money for Grandpa’s care. But she never managed to save any for her own passage to America.
Rose died twelve years later when Grandpa was seventeen.
She never knew that her dreams for him came to fruition. My grandfather loved his Aunt Nettie. He also loved books and went to college. He became a teacher.
I believe Rose would have been so proud, knowing her sacrifices gave him a good life.
Amanda, the question I kept coming back to throughout my pregnancy was, could I be as strong as Rose had been? Could I put your needs first?
All those times I asked myself what if I kept you, I never found a scenario where you’d have the childhood I wanted for you. My parents had offered to