A Tin of Memories, Melancholy, and Gratitude

When the box arrived, I hardly knew what to do with it. I am sentimental to a fault -- tears in the eyes and lumps in the throat can be paralyzing for me -- and these days are too busy to stand still. From a safe distance I finally sliced the tape and lifted the bluebonnet tin. But even then I waited. I knew what was inside. Over the Thanksgiving holidays my sister-in-law and my mother had rediscovered the boxes of Christmas ornaments that recent years of holiday simplification had left stored away. My brother's family took away their share. The shipping company delivered mine. Ornaments from through the years. School projects. Kitchen crafts. The very crucible of deep memories, melancholic joy, and lumps in the throat.

Today I am alone -- my day off from the office and Lori at work. With the last page of the novel turned and the laundry underway, I stared at the empty branches on the Christmas tree downstairs and understood that today was the day. I carried the tin gingerly from my dresser down the stairs as if it were an offering of some kind -- which, I suppose in a way, it was. Setting aside the lid and the bubble wrap inside I retrieved the construction paper Santa long faded and bent, the yarn Santa faces my Grandmother had knitted, and the brownish "shrinky-dink" ornaments in which I could neither remember nor discern any particular shape or intention. And I hung them. Offerings from my past to my present; from all that has gone before, to all that is and is to come. Silently. Carefully. Gratefully.

We are, I thought again, never fully formed, but always becoming -- the holy alchemy of all we have learned and experienced, all who have left upon us their fingerprints and on whose shoulders we stand, and all that is catching our eyes and touching our hearts and pricking our imaginations at the time. The fullness of our past -- in its simple profundity -- as the nursery of our present -- in all its unpredictable wonder. My grandmother's care, my own clumsy but determined coloring and scissoring, my mother's patience and my sister-in-law's diligence -- fifty-one years of moments and treasures, of words and actions, of hooking on branches and packing carefully away; an old woman and a little boy; a young mother and countless precious hours -- all together in one place, joining all the life and love and memories since: here, now, beautifully, tearfully united and alive.

I was right about the tears and the lump in the throat. I was right about the sentimental embrace. But I was wrong about the rest. I'm not paralyzed at all; rather strangely and quite surprisingly alive in a way as new and fresh as the snow; and larger than I have ever known. And it is good.

Merry Christmas, indeed.