Archive | December 2023

King’s X

Dec27

Barb chased Alice around, back, and forth through the yard. Donna zig-zagged across the lawn to get out of the way, while I did the same thing in the opposite direction. Our game of tag had one rule: we had to stay in the yard. That wasn’t a problem. The yard was large. My three neighborhood cousins and I had plenty of room to move around. Our shrill screams cut through the still yard. Bats living in the orchard woke up and swooped through the darkening sky above to devour mosquitoes. A firefly slowly blinked its way across the lawn. I shuffled my feet through the dewy grass, enjoying how cool it felt. The day had been uncomfortably hot.

Alice unexpectedly changed direction and picked up speed. Donna happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Since this sister would be an easier tag victim, Barb reached out to touch her. Donna evaded her by dropping to the cool, damp grass and rolling out of reach. Stopping in her tracks, Barb called out, “Tag! You’re it!”

Jumping to her feet, Donna hotly replied, “I am not! You missed touching me.”

Barb shouted, “I did too, touch you! I felt your hair with my fingers just as you moved away.”

Alice jumped into the argument with, “Touching hair doesn’t count.”

Bemused, I listened to my cousins argue. There were seven children in my family, but my siblings were all five and a half to fifteen years older than me, causing me at times to feel like an only child. We never had shouting-match fights. My cousins came from a family of seven children as well, and these three were all one year apart.

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Away in a Manger

Dec20

Sister Florence looked ancient. All we could see of her body were her hands and face, since everything else was covered with her flowing robe, starched wimple and veil. Her hands and face were very wrinkled. Sister Florence seemed especially old, because in the last few years, most of the new sisters assigned to our school convent were very young. Sister Donna, my first-grade teacher, looked no older than my sister who had just graduated from college.

Sister Florence’s advanced age prompted my third-grade class to speculate on whether she would possibly retire soon. By the beginning of November, it appeared that all the scary stories and rumors about Sister weren’t true. She wasn’t mean, wasn’t on the verge of having a nervous breakdown, nor likely to drop dead from old age during classes.

Sister Florence turned out to be kind. When we had our first snowfall that year, we were excited and couldn’t concentrate. She sighed but then instructed, “All of you go stand by the windows for a few minutes to watch the falling snow. When you sit back down, I want your full attention.”

Another example of her kindness occurred while a new convent for the sisters was being built next to our school that year. When the construction crew lifted the cross to its roof with a crane, she told us to watch, saying, “You’ll remember this all your life.”

On the last day of November, my class and I entered the classroom after recess to discover small, open-topped boxes with our names on them lined up on a blackboard eraser shelf. Hushing our whispering, Sister Florence unnecessarily explained, “Christmas is coming.”  

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Mary’s Christmas

Dec13

Mary smiled when I walked into her room at the Stoney River Assisted Living Facility. She exclaimed, “My sweet little baby sister!” I laughed and kissed her cheek. She had often called me that when we were growing up in our childhood home.

Holding out a small vase filled with lovely red and yellow tea rose blossoms for her to see, I marveled, “Despite the cold nights this past week, the rose bushes in my garden are blossoming. All the plastic walls of the greenhouse do is block the wind, but that must be enough to allow some healthy plants to thrive this late into fall.”

My sister lightly touched a blossom and observed, “They’re pretty.”

Placing my flowers on the dresser across from her bed, I commented, “It’s hard to believe that Christmas is just a little over two months from now! As a little girl, I loved when you told me your memories of moving into the new farmhouse two days after Christmas the year before I was born.”

Mary nodded and explained, “Daddy said the varnish on the woodwork wasn’t dry until then. A bed sheet was wrapped around the Christmas tree, and it was carried across the snowy yard to our new house. Only one ornament fell and broke.”

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Choosing What to Remember

Dec6

Sitting at the dining table at our Airbnb apartment in Rome, I took a sip of hot tea and commented, “You won’t be able to top what we experienced yesterday!”

Chuckling, my daughter took a nibble of a Nutella cookie and admitted, “That’s true! How could anything top our meeting Pope Francis and shaking his hand?”

Spreading strawberry jelly on a cracker, I confessed, “While waiting for our turn to meet the Pope, I kept thinking about the nursery rhyme that goes, ‘Pussycat, pussycat, where have you been? I’ve been down to London to see the Queen. Pussycat, pussycat, what did you there? I scared a mouse under her chair’. Only for us, the rhyme would go, ‘Pussycat, pussycat, where have you been? I’ve been down to Rome to see the Pope. Pussycat, Pussycat, what did you there? I shook the hand of the Pope, with excitement hard to bear.’”

Blowing on her tea to cool it, Tammie agreed, “We were lucky little pussycats to have that experience yesterday! Our visiting the Vatican Museum and the Sistine Chapel today won’t be as exciting, but I’m looking forward to it.” Proud to have planned so well, Tammie bragged, “We won’t have to stand in long lines. The tour will allow us to go, see, and leave. I’m also hoping to be the first tourists of the day to visit the Sistine Chapel and it won’t be crowded.”

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