Home for the holidays 2007
That photograph was taken this winter in Maine. Maine was my home for the first part of my life until I went away to college. If someone were to send me home for the holidays, I guess they’d send me to Maine, although I have never lived there again since I went off to school. In some ways, it is and always will be home to me. If I see snapshots of snowbanks and frosted fir trees I am swamped with nostalgia. I have thousands of visual memories of Maine in winter, some gorgeous and some appalling.
That place is not my home, it’s an inn in Bethel, Maine. I never saw our home decorated outside for Christmas, although it may have happened long after I left, when decorating the outside of your house became something almost anybody might do. I don’t even know if it is decorated this year, because I haven’t asked nor have I seen a photo of my old home in the past few years.
When I married and had a child, I said to my husband that our house would be home at the holidays, and only once during those years were we anywhere else, but that time was not in Maine, but in Nebraska, his home. I was really serious about that statement, because we were a military family and I felt it would be only too easy for our child not to have a feeling of home and of roots. Wherever we were, whoever we knew, I felt very sure that we needed to make that ensemble be home for her. She had a lot of homes over those years. She never saw Maine at Christmas, either. I’m sorry about that.
This photograph was taken by my sister Jackie. Jackie is our baby sister, and I used to say she was the nicest among us, but now I think the better term is the most reasonable human being among us. She’s smart, talented and capable, but even more important to me, she’s kind. We all have some of those qualities among my family, but getting them all rolled up in one I don’t think has happened in any of the rest of us. Maybe because she came so long after the rest of us we all focused on her without competition or judgment, maybe she got more love because of that, or maybe she was just born to be more reasonable and more humane.
What’s all this got to do with your Christmas? Not a blessed thing, unless you too are living far from home and the people you love, unless you too think about Christmas past, and unless you too don’t make enough opportunities to tell your loved ones that you love them. In specific terms that apply only to that one person, not just, “Love you!” as you get off the phone, but “how do I love you, let me count the ways,” which is what the post is about.
That was my home, this is my sister, these are my memories, this is my love. I love her still just as I loved her when she was three years old and peeped through my windows like an elf. I love her dimples, her strong hands, her intelligence and her responsible take on life. She never stops learning or giving. Her life is full of troubles that one rarely hears about. You can count on Jackie.
Best of all, I can just say what I think, because of course you know I have another even closer young lady in my life, but that one has a highly developed sense of privacy which prevents me from posting about her. That one gets, “Love you!” and she knows that I do. If I had my way, there’d be a page with her portrait and all the lists of how do I love you, because when it comes right down to it, if home is where your heart is, home is wherever she is.
Merry Christmas to you all, and I hope you are with the ones you love.
4 comments December 24th, 2007
