Well, I mailed off the check to the Union Gospel Mission and our family purchased 100 meals. I just like the sound of that number better than what I first said. So a lot of folks will eat inside where it is warm (it’s freezing and snowy here now) and not be alone and get a traditional holiday meal. I hope they have some good memories of another day and time when they were with their families. I hope the children got some gifts from a kind Santa. Merry Christmas to all of us!
***********************
This so tender about gift wrapping... here
***************
Christmas is all about love. I'm still thinking about loving my sister. When she was 20 or so she had a real challenge in her life that was so traumatic and she was battling life on her own. I was so impacted by her being abandoned, that is the only word that comes to mind, and so wounded within myself at her aloneness and pain and plight, that something inside of me rose up. A fierceness, a loyalty, a devotion, a determination that no matter what happened to her for the rest of her life...I would always be in her corner. I would always have her back. She would never be without me. I would never be against her. I would always be there for her.
The aftermath was that I did that right to the end of her life and her letter to me attests to that fact. It made me happy that I'd been her protector in ways that only she and I knew. The downside of the choice I made was I lacked closeness and connection with her 4 daughters. They love me and I love them but we are not as close as things coulda/woulda/shoulda been. Dixie had a lot of resistance/opposition in personal relationships including her ex-Mother-in-law. She had a lot of pain but she also had a lot of happiness.
She had the ability to create beauty and surrounded herself with an abundance of it. She loved.... top of the line fake greenery and had it all over her house...and lace...and teacups...and gorgeous furniture...and beautiful clothes...and sparkly jewelry...and properly coiffed hair...and make-up done to the nines...and bargains- for her/her family/her friends...and HSN/QVC...and her friends...and eating out at restaurants or eating in with friends for lunch. And on and on and on....!
This picture (propped up on my bookshelf) is so representative of her. She slipped her oxygen line off and is holding it in her left hand and the line is on floor behind chair and you can see the stash of oxygen bottles there. She has her full make-up on. (When she was at our house or McCall or wherever...she'd get up early to be ready for the day and be all dolled up! Terry never once saw her without make-up!) She is wearing an outfit and it has a pink satin blouse. she seldom wore pink but she wanted a picture taken in this special purchase (in real life it was stunning with the bead work on it) and then she gifted it to her oldest daughter for a memory gift. She loved her clock and had shopped for days to find just the right one. The cane back chair was from a Red Lion Inn, that was changing out furniture. She had found the chairs were $279 in a catalog and she got them for $27 dollars. She bought and gave chairs to everyone!! She immediately had hers re-upholstered in animal print. To her dismay and being slightly miffed that I didn't act at once on the 6 she gave me, she was always threatening to take them back! that is why she gifted things and wouldn't let you purchase them...technically they were still hers and she could call the shots. Mine still aren't done but they are gorgeous chairs. I see the mirrored chandelier refection of her small formal dining room and am reminded of her knowing exactly what she wanted and nothing else would do. She carried in her purse for years a picture of a glass top dining room table with 4 armless white upholstered chairs with seat-skirt to the floor. Always feeling she had a "shopping angel" and always knowing that what she wanted would turn up, she waited and kept looking and one day what she wanted would turn up. The replica of her magazine picture did turn up. The exact replica. I have that paper that she carried around for so long.
She is in a good place now and not in pain and I feel she is happy. I miss her but not to the point of not living my life to it's fullest. That honors her- by me living my time on earth to the fullest. I will do so with gusto. IF I can muster up the gusto!!
No comments:
Post a Comment