In celebration of the recent 150th anniversary of the publication of Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures by Mary Baker Eddy, a textbook beloved by my family for many generations, I am inspired to share the following story.
It’s the story of a woman from Mrs. Eddy’s era whose discovery of this textbook had a profound impact on our family. This woman ran a boarding house sometime between 1900 and 1910. A sixteen-year-old girl asked to rent one of the rooms and soon got a job to pay for it. The young girl’s name was Pearl, and she was my grandmother. As my grandmother told it, she had lost her father and mother when only twelve years old, and she and her younger siblings were each sent off to live with relatives, separating the family.
This was devastating for my grandmother because she dearly loved her two-year-old brother and could only see him once a week. The disappointments kept coming. Although my grandmother was hoping to go to college, the relatives she was sent to live with treated her like a servant. When she reached sixteen, they said she had to leave and make her own way in the world.
