Our children grew up on peanut butter and jelly   sandwiches. Even my husband and I sometimes ate one secretly at late night with a glass of milk. It was too delicious and tasty. My mother-in-law was the jelly maker in this family. The jelly was made of either grape or blackberry. The only job I did to the jelly making was to save baby food jars  , which my mother-in-law would fill with the tasty gel  , pack them up and send back to our home. For the past 22 years of my married life, whenever I wanted to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich for ourselves, all I had to do was reach for one of those little jars of jelly. It was always there. This past December, my mother-in-law passed away. Among the things in the house to be divided by her children were the remaining canned goods in the pantry  . When my husband brought his jars home, we carefully put them away in our pantry. The other day I reached in there to get jelly for a quick sandwich, and there _ was. Sitting all alone on the far side of the shelf was a small jar of grape jelly. As I picked up the jar, I suddenly realized something that I had failed to see earlier-this was the last jar we would ever have from my mother-in-law. Although she had been dead for nearly a year, so much of her had remained with us. Our children had never known a day without their grandmother's jelly. It seems like such a small thing, and most days it was something that was ignored. But today it seemed a great treasure. No longer was it just a jar of jelly. It was the end of a family tradition. I believed that as long as it was there, a part of my mother-in-law would always live on. What did the mother-in-law leave to the author?
The skills to make jelly. Some baby food in the house. Some canned jars filled with jelly. A lot of money.