Merrily Single at Fifty-Four

There are days when I am glad to be free. It is exciting to be able to remember who I was before I was married. To excavate the artist within, long buried, is at times nothing less than thrilling. Less exciting, but still nice is not finding tighty-whities in my laundry, because in three decades I never could figure out how to fold them right. It is also reassuring to know that no meat lurks in my freezer, since now only we vegetarians reside here. But truthfully, there are days when being divorced and fifty-four is a pretty lonely place to be. And so it is at Christmas time.

When our family was completely intact, we loved Christmas so! There was abundance, there was joy, there was stress too, but oh how we all loved red and green.  My girls and I still do. We celebrate more simply these days and everything we touch and give and make is heartfelt. In the material world for us, "plenty" has made way for "precious"and that is a pretty good trade-off.

But there are those days, and today is one of them, when the stores are filled with older couples, heads together in thought - pondering slipper sizes or debating how many bags of pecans are needed for this year's pie. I turn away when I glimpse such intimacy or hear such sacred murmurings about the seemingly mundane.  I walk on wistfully to the next isle, forgetting my oatmeal, forgetting for a minute why I was at the store in the first place.

Later, I struggle up the long courtyard carrying the boxed Little Tykes car for my granddaughter that I struggled to afford, and it is heavier than it should be.  I come into an empty apartment, happy that I got this great toy for the little gumbygirl, and there is no one to ooh and ahhh over it with me.

I make a cup of coffee and sit down to feel sorry about this, and it occurs to me, that even when I was married, I rarely had someone to discuss slipper sizes with or even shop for pecans with, or at least I hadn't had for a very, very long time. And I realize that this loneliness I feel, is nothing new.  I think back to the days, where my footsteps were as heavy as my heart, dragging around that vague sense of being alone in a marriage that lasted for decades.

As I sit staring at our newly decorated, scrawny silver tree there is a small rejoicing over the realization, that it is far, far better to be by myself, then to live with someone and be utterly and truly alone. 

No great revelation here, I am sure, but sometimes things are so simple that we step right over them.  So I raise my coffee mug to simplicity and the genuine; to my beautiful girls and the love I have all around from them and their own new families. Alone, I celebrate this quiet, blissful reality. Sitting humbly before this artificial tree - put together limb by limb with love and gratitude, I am at this minute, merrily single at fifty-four.

Beneath This Tacky Tree

This is the first year, in the 32 years since I moved out of my parents' home that I do not have a real tree for Christmas. I know, I can hear the collective gasp, but it is a big change for us, and since change has visited my family all around and over and over again these past few years, it just seemed fitting.

Used to be that Christmas just wasn't Christmas until we picked out our big evergreen from the tree farm.  The joke in our family was that the tree had to call out to mom, it had to softly, sweetly, beg to be the one; "kill me, kill me," the tree would plead, telepathically of course.But, before saw ever touched trunk, I had the family hold hands while I sang, O Tannenbaum. Seriously, we did this.  When they were little, the kids sang along, when they got older they rolled their eyes, when they got even older they hid in nearby trees.

But some traditions must fall by the wayside. This is the first Christmas in many years without our  old pets. It is the third Christmas as a fractured family.  It is the first year out of the only home my girls have ever known. It just didn't feel right celebrating in the same manner. Where we are now, space is limited, hearts are healing and it was time for something different.

Different came by way of eBay. Our tree arrived a week after the highest bid, shipped promptly in a recycled brown box with our address written in black Sharpie. I was the winner of a vintage, bedraggled, shedding, aluminum beauty, just under six feet tall and just like the one I had when I was four years old.

It was actually fun for my daughters and me to separate the branches according to size and fit them into the ill-fitting holes. It was nice having the old ornaments we had collected over the years, showcased on the sparse, stiff limbs. And, guess what? It sparkles without any lights at all. The truly vintage electric color wheels that spin and change the tree different colors were also a hot item on eBay, but they were out of  our budget this year. I do remember sitting fascinated when I was a kid, watching the tree go from red to blue to yellow, while the little wheel went round and round. It was so high-tech back then but now seems sort of  homespun.

At the moment, it is a temporary home, where my girls and I find ourselves. It might be a long time before we have a home of our home again. But right now, this place feels heavenly and this cusp we are living on, where the last two of my chicks are poised for take off, is oh so precious to us. It is a girls place here, where pink reigns and silver bangles sit artfully by the kitchen sink. It is a place, decidedly feminine. Our place for now. But isn't everything, only for now?

Some day we, I mean I, (I will have to get used to saying "I") will have a house of my own again.  And when that time comes, the tacky aluminum tree will come along. It will share the space with a real tree and be a sparkling reminder of these often trying, oh-so-fleeting, good old days.

 

Ugly Santas

What I love about Christmas is remembering what it felt like to believe in Santa. Of course if I believed Santa ever looked like any of these guys, I would have hid under my bed till New Years.  The girl in me still likes Santa, but now with a twist and it has been fun rescuing these guys from flea markets. The last photos is a postcard, the others all gather together on shelves with other tacky offerings of Christmas past.  There are dozens of cute little fellows that didn't make the ugly Santa cut and one much scarier guy, that my adult children were too frightened to let me bring out of the storage bin.  My dear friend, SteveMeeple, thinks his Santas are uglier than mine, but nope, not even close.