WINTER HARBOR & SULLIVAN – Christmas came a little early for a Hancock County woman, thanks to some help from the Winter Harbor Police Department.
“To get that picture at this time when I’ve been kind of saying, ‘Mom, where are you'”, said Veronica Grinnan about what this meant to her.
“Just sitting in the outer reaches of some closet … not sure why it was there,” said Winter Harbor Police Chief Danny Mitchell Jr. about the discovery.
Chief Mitchell was cleaning out a supply closet Tuesday, when he found a camera that had apparently been turned into the station years ago.
He said the camera was originally found on Newman Street in Winter Harbor, and now about six years later, it has been returned to the family it belonged to.
The camera had no name, but when the chief looked at photos on the memory card, he saw a local woman he knew, Ellen Duke, who passed away this year.
“She was a great person, she was one of the nicest people you’ll ever meet,” said Chief Mitchell.
The camera was returned to Duke’s daughter in Sullivan, Veronica Grinnan, who said shortly before she heard about the camera she had posted on Facebook about how much she missed her mom.
“That was at 6:15 that I posted that, at 6:42 I got a message from Rosalie Mitchell, who’s Danny Mitchell’s wife, and she posted a picture of my mom,” said Grinnan.
The picture the Mitchell’s sent to Grinnan had meaning, too…
“She used to say how this bird from nowhere came and landed on her finger and that she had pictures of it but that, ‘your knucklehead father lost the camera off the car’…so just like a fish story, we used to say, ‘yeah, yeah right mom'”, said Grinnan.
The Mitchell’s drove out in the middle of Tuesday’s storm to return the camera, with that picture Grinnan was always hearing about.
“I had goosebumps, and I said ‘wow mom, I know you’re up there laughing, you’re laughing at me'”, she said.
Since her mom has passed, her father is in a nursing home, and her son is in the U.S. Air Force, Grinnan said getting the photos back now is nothing short of a miracle.
She said it made her Christmas a little more special and that it was like hearing her mom say, “this is my voice to you, that I do hear you and I am there with you.”
