I wrote my mom this note a few years ago. It’s appropriate to share it with you for Mother’s Day….
Hey Mom,
I’m getting ready to throw a sweatshirt away, and I’m writing because I think you bought it for me many, many moons ago. It’s my old gray insulated hooded sweatshirt that’s been with me everywhere; from 14,000+ feet in Colorado to sea-level at Assateague; numerous wilderness weeks, campouts all over the Midwest, and campfires too numerous to count.
It’s going to that great closet in the sky, where I’m sure that God will sew up the tattered sleeves and other rips in the fabric, he’ll fix the busted zipper, replace the string in the hood, and then he will thicken the spots grown thin at the wrists over the years, and he’ll bleach out the red and yellow and blue paint from the RLCA playground equipment workday, and then he will put it on his “hooded sweatshirt stretcher” that fixes up sweatshirts that their owners have shrunk in the dryer 
and eventually I will be wearing it again at that great campfire in the sky when we’ll sing “happy birthday” to everyone in 50 different ways and play the rhythm game and tool around on our guitars singing great hymns of the faith and “Afghan” on a cool autumn night with stars wheeling overhead and a full moon coming up late in the night and no one will be too tired to stay up to see it rise at 1:00 in the morning and it will be glorious beyond all compare.
I just wanted to say thanks. I’ve always thought that you were the best gift-giver that I’ve ever known, because your gifts always seem long-lasting, well-suited to the receiver, and “just what I needed.”
So, “Thanks.”
Much love,
Nate
