The Fresh Start of a New Year

Whoa. January 7 already? A whole week of this brand spanking new year gone? Man - this time flying stuff is catching me off guard.

Not that the year hasn't started off in an interesting way nor that there aren't some major events up ahead. Some of them any day now. woo woo lucky TheQueen!

It's just that I don't feel the familiar verve to put word to paper - even virtual paper. I do feel a sort of nagging guilt to do so - because:
a. I like to blog
b. I have always talked to much anyway
c. I have a secret yen to be a writer - as in, ya' know, a real writer.

But even a real writer has to have something to say. And, perhaps, right now I am all about the experiencing, not the saying.

In an effort to stimulate my writer-self, I looked back over some previous January 1 posts here and in the original LikeTheQueen blog. At first it was hard because the past few Januaries have been full of missing Mama and while it was fun to see old photos of her - OUCH - there was also that pinch. Lawsie I miss that woman. The "missing" is sliding into the good pain zone - where the missing of Pop and Grandma lives - but it's still a little raw.

The older posts are all about knitting and not buying so much durn yarn and trying to lose weight and declutter and oh - be more cool. And all sorts of cryptic things about werk because - well - one does NOT blog about one's job. At least, not about the trials of it -even if it's the looming monster waiting to devour; the banshee outside your bedroom door (there is a story to that, btw).  I can promise there will be more cryptic posts in the future because - still werkin' ya' know.

So - nothing in the past prompted my creativity. And my present is all about the snow. As in - it's snowing today and we're promised 7 inches. That makes today just right for this




and this:

I could post about my New Year's Resolutions, but I think I'll let Calvin say it for me:

Perfect as I am, though - I think I shall make this commitment: I shall blog at least twice a month. And to help me find something to say I have bought a pretty little journal of writing prompts. I'm supposed to write in that but I know I won't. I already have enough pretty journals to hand write about the Life-0-TheQueen. These are "make your life better" journals and it doesn't matter if I mix up all the letters that are circles with tails in these. One is for cooking. One is for more personal stuff.

But to practice wrapping my thoughts up in beautiful words I'll be blogging about oh - you know - My Favorite Piece of Art and Why. (of course who could have a real favorite piece of art - do you love that hunky David more than the Boating Party? Yeah. I'd have a hard time picking too.

 

Still and all - I'm gonna give it a try. After 3 months I'll revisit this idea and decide if I want to continue. So. Stay tuned. (I used to think they were saying state tuned when the TV announcer said that - like whatever I was watching was specific to Virginia.) And stay warm. 

BIRTHDAY MONTH

Well. It's September. It's birthday month. Time to celebrate for 30 days. This is good. This even makes me happy. This is a happy making, good thing even if I am coming across a little subdued. So many many good things happen in September - ordinary scheduled good things like oh - back to school - which for this gal was always something to revel in, with its new notebooks (yes. I have one) and sharp pencils, new clothes, (Yes. have some of those too). It's also the season of HOLIDAYS - starting with Labor Day and flowing through birthday, Columbus Day, sister's birthday, Halloween, Veterans' Day, Thanksgiving, on up to that peak of Holiday Frenzy'n'Joy - Christmas - with a final kick of New Year's Day just in case you haven't had enough festivity. 

So yes. September. Great month for this Virgo. 

Even if - and perhaps also because - the anniversary of Mama's death is rolling around too. If I am honest - which I try to be most of the time - I'm a little glad that if I had to lose Mama it would be during my Birthday month. I always thought that would be really sad - I remember a precious Virgo boy I knew who's brother died the week of his birthday and he told me he'd never be able to be happy on his birthday again.   Well - they were both teens so the pain was coupled with the unnaturalness of early death. My mother was ready to go home and I am actually not sorry for her at all that she left me a year ago. I'm kind of glad, actually, that she can go on to the Next Thing. Keeping her with me would really have been such an act of selfishness - had I been given the opportunity - and she would have let me keep her, too, because well - Mama. Most giving woman in the world. 

So I am glad for her that she's flown off to joy and newness and more and next. And I'm even more glad that she did it in my birthday month. And every year I'll be able to add the anniversary of Mama's freedom to my celebrations - and ya know? - that's a really good thing. 

And for us Virgos - Jupiter has come to stay with us for a whole year. How nice is that? He's bringing a whole basket full of goodies for my party and I'm going to be so durn busy I probably won't have a moment to reflect on things for a while. How like Mama to give me a year to grieve and then send Jupiter to cheer me up when that year is over. I mean - she could have gone away this year or next - when I'd have to wait 12 more years to frolic with Jupiter again.  I'll be what? 75? hmm. I'll be glad of that too when it comes, but in the mean time - I am ready for some bounty and some joy and somehow, today, I can feel Mama's arms cuddling me close to her. I can hear her whisper laughing naughty funny joyful tender admiring beautiful sweet love words into my ear.

Thank you mama. Thank you for my Birthday Month. I hope you are having total fun in your Next Good Thing.

Missing Mama on Mother's Day

Mama and me 

Last Monday I had another of those heart clutching moments that turned my expression sour - as I realized I won't get to celebrate Mother's Day with Mama this year. It's funny how this whole process of grieving for Mama is so full of grouchy anger. You'd think I'd be sad. Instead I'm ticked off at TheUniverse-and-TheWayThingsAre. Grrrrr. Fortunately, God has broad shoulders and  He understands that we all grieve in our own ways. If I didn't know Mama and I would be together some day I would probably be sad instead of mad.

Here at TheCastle we don't really "do" Mother's Day. For almost all of the early years we were too poor to celebrate with stuff and there were other dynamics that prevented us from celebrating in less costly ways. I assured LD that it was just a Halmark Card Holiday and he wasn't to feel compelled to "do" anything. But heck. We didn't "do" Valentine's day either. Lordy - either we really were poor as church mice or I had no confidence in ThePrince - a man who's sentimentality is almost completely self focused - either remembering the day or devising a suitable response.  (probably a little bit of both) It was just easier to have no expectations than to have them crushed.

I know better now and just remind ThePrince that Valentine's day is coming and a poem on a heart is required. In return he gets steak-in-the-kitchen - which we both thoroughly enjoy.

But for Mama. Ahh. That was different. In fact, I lavished special things on both mamas in May because I loved my mother in law  second only to my own dear Mama. She has been gone so long the pinch and the grouchiness has abated but this is the first year in a long time that I haven't gone to spend time with my sweet little mother and oh my goodness how I wish I had one more opportunity. But now I think of it - neither of those women were very sentimental either. Mama always smiled gently at us when we presented our grubby little wild flower bouquets. We wheedled Daddy to drive into town to the drugstore to buy Whitman's Samplers. He always said "She's not my mother. Why should I buy her anything?" But we knew, even then, that he was the sentimental one and had planned all along to take us shopping for a Mother's Day gift. He even paid for everything instead of making us use our allowances. No. The real story is that he was the one who'd be hurt if we were lax or forgot - either the Father's Day thing or his Valentine. So, perhaps Mama is the one who influenced me about not getting all caught up in the gift giving guilt thing. Good thing, too, since ThePrince and I really did live on a shoestring for that first decade.

Besides - I honored Mama every day. I have never liked to talk on the telephone - not even when I was a teen. But I could talk to her every day on the phone and often did. In those early years when we didn't have a telephone, I wrote her letters. I have a box of them now, that she saved and I collected when we emptied her house out 8 years ago.  I shared things with her regularly. She knew about every joy and every triumph and I was careful to shield her from any bad news because I knew how sharply my pain pricked her. Yet if it was important I would share because she was the only one who could soothe. There really never was a Mother's Day for us - not even a Mother's 365 Day. For us, the love, the honor, the devotion was constant. I was deeply blessed by a mother who loved me and it's something that strengthens my spine and shields my tender heart every single day.

So this year, like all the other First Time Without Mama things, Mother's Day will come and pinch my heart and then go. It is just The Way Things Are. 

Missing Mama in the Springtime

On Easter Sunday we drove to the city to spend it with precious cousins. The day was beautiful, the temperature just right, and the winding drive through Virginia back roads was long enough that once we were into the second hour, Mr and Mrs Chatty ran out of things to say.  This might not have happened had we not just taken a somewhat shorter drive down these same back roads the day before, but once we were nestled in the car-cocoon of silence, the tiny emotional crack in my heart had a chance to split wide open and I began to yearn for my mama.

Easter Sunday was one of the days I would drive to the city to visit with Mama. Last year I took her daffodils. Every year I took her daffodils. Daffodils were her favorite flower and for some reason she never had very many. I, otoh, have thousands of them so I can be ... not just generous ... but lavish.  In the spring I would snip a cluster of them, wrap them in wet paper towels, pop them in a zip-lock bag, and head west - first to her home on the other side of the city, in later years to her assisted living apartment, and finally to the nursing home.

How her eyes would light up when I'd step through the door with my golden sunshine bouquet. Each enthusiastic greeting was completely sincere - as if it were the first time anybody had ever given her daffodils. I understand that. Every year, when they begin to open up along my lane, I feel like there has never been a flower before and now there is this swath of gold. There really is no flower quite like the daffodil.

She and I would sit with the bouquet between us and sniff its Easter scent. We'd touch each outer petal - the perianth - and praise it. We'd run fingers around the rim of the cups. We would discuss the color, the fleshy texture, the vivid eyes of the small flat ones. We would sigh.  One of us would say "Oh how I love daffodils."  The other would say "Oh, me too. They're my favorite flower."

Which is not exactly true since when the roses are in bloom, they are my favorite  flower, and the pansy! oh my - who doesn't love a pansy? And stocks, with their clove scent.  And gladiolas! Be Glad! And the snapdragon! How fruity they smell. They were the ubiquitous cut flower in bouquets sent to mothers of new babies back in my childhood, in my southern town. I can still remember Mama, in bed with the new baby in one arm and me, snuggled up close, beneath her other arm as she showed me how to pinch the sides of the blossom and make the dragon open and close its mouth.  Imagine that! A puppet flower!

It's odd that Mama didn't grow many daffodils since she had the greenest of green thumbs and could push a stick in the ground and a few weeks later it would blossom.  She was country born and bred - but at a time when country was actually within walking distance of town. She grew up in the tenant house down the slope from her grandmother's farm - not 2 miles outside of Johnstown PA - and walked to school all her life - in town.  Her dad was not a farmer - he was a mechanic - and an inventor - but her mother certainly had many farm girl skills.  According to Mama, her own mother didn't want anybody in the kitchen so Mama didn't learn to cook.  I say "according" because Mama wasn't at all above inventing a better story than the real one if it suited her. Neither did my utterly delightful mother-in-law. In fact, I once caught Grandma (M-i-L) in an outright fabrication and called her on it - to which she replied, "I know it's not true but it makes the story so much better!"

Well. I utterly adored both of those women - Grandma running a close second only to Mama - who really was the pinnacle, the shining star, the most beloved woman in my life.  I was doubly blessed.  Come to think of it - neither of them ever bragged about their cooking - and Mama would go so far as to look up with tears in her eyes when Daddy complained about one of her odd meals and say "You knew I wasn't a cook when you married me!"

I don't actually know if she really was barred from the kitchen as a girl or if her sisters did learn from their mother to become good cooks or if she just hated cooking or if she was too busy dreaming of her next painting to pay attention to cooking. We always had free reign in the kitchen so long as we cleaned up after ourselves. She assigned meal preparation to her daughters as quickly as they grew interested in it and by the time the last one had moved out, Daddy had retired and they ate reheated canned stuff in front of the nightly news.

Springtime memories of Mama all seem to pivot around naughty girl experiences: Skipping church to walk along the James River, where, she declared, "I'm sure God can hear our prayers just as easily as in church."   Or maybe taking a day off from school just to go walk the paths of Maymont Park.  Or a lunch in a restaurant - an extravagance in those days when restaurant meals were for special occasions only.

For all that Mama grew up in the country - she wasn't much of an outdoors girl. What she loved to do was paint - and draw - and mold things with clay. My house is full of her artwork and I have only a tiny sampling.  That was her life when she wasn't ferrying around 4 girls; to music lessons, school functions, rehearsals or interesting sites around the city. As only a come-here can - she explored her city constantly, tracking down parks and tiny museums and finding tours of local industries that gave away free samples. She honored where she lived more than anyone I ever knew.

But the most precious springtime memory I have of Mama is of the day we planted gladiolas - a day I wrote down years ago in an essay called Love in the Garden - and here is the important part - the bit about Mama and how much she wrapped me in love in the springtime in the garden:

... when I seek love, and not just romance, in the garden I harden back to an afternoon - probably April, likely I was 8, and home from school on one of those oh, so precious and rare days when Mama would let me skip school for a time-out day. Mama was planting gladiolas. “GLAD- iolas” I thought. Glad to be out of school. Glad to be digging in the dirt. Glad to have Mama all to myself. In my memory there are no other people on earth.  The flat round corms, like turbans or the crown on one of the kings in the Christmas crèche, some of them with last year’s ghost shape still on top. The new ones that were a little more golden colored than the ones who had spent time in the ground in August, fattening for the following spring, feeling smooth against my fingertips.  But most of all I remember how loved I felt as we talked quietly, easily, unhurriedly, and prepared, as gardeners have done since the beginning of time, for summer’s bounty. When I plant gladiolas now, I always feel that warmth of Mama’s love washing around me. 

Green Drink - another Mama Christmas Memory

What has been is what will be,
and what has been done is what will be done,
and there is nothing new under the sun.
   ..........  Ecclesiastes  1:4-11

You may call it a green smoothie but in 1962 it was known in The Palace off Jhanke Rd., infamously and miserably, as Green Drink. Our aunt, the health food nut, had talked our I-Hate-To-Cook mother into trying her concoction of bitter greens and other sour flavors with the promise of rejuvenation and everlasting health.  "You just put it all in a blender and whip it up"

And so, for Christmas that year, Mama asked for a blender. I knew it was coming. The eavesdropping snoopy girl was bound to hang around when grownups were talking - especially between Thanksgiving and Christmas.  I seriously doubted it would taste good. I was already learning that Mama was not much of a cook and Aunt Ellen was very much a kook. I crossed my fingers but ... doubt remained.

Christmas day dawned and the blender was there under the tree but Mama didn't leap right into action. In fact, we had our usual cookies, candy, desserts and gravy for Christmas day and it wasn't until the 28th that the dread whir of the blender struck doom into our quaking hearts.  That was my baby sister's birthday and the anxiety was palpable - what child likes green food? Dr. Seuss knew of which he spoke when he wrote Green Eggs and Ham.

Into the blender went 1/2 a cup of pineapple juice, a hand full of almonds and heaping mounds of green leaves; curly kale, parsley, flat collards.  It smelled funny. It looked the consistency of poi - another nasty taste she'd offered us, as party food, for goodness sake, one benighted summer afternoon. That was in 1959, the year of everything Hawaiian,  in honor of the new state. Thank goodness no Alaskan food was being celebrated - I can just see my bad cook of a mother trying to make walrus blubber palatable.

But I digress - back to the Green Drink. She poured the evil stuff into juice glasses and told us to drink up. Ugh. The kale made it bitter, the parsley made it pungent, and the thick texture made it particularly difficult to swallow. Poor Baby Sister. Even I thought that it was unfair to force a child to drink nasty green stuff on a birthday. She wept, loudly, copious tears, and begged to be let off just for one day. How could mama torture her on her birthday?!?

At this point Daddy stepped in with his ever offered inducement to "do it or else .... "
A threat to which we always submitted because we knew he'd carry it out. A spanking in addition to the green drink - on a birthday - was really beyond endurance ... for the birthday girl or her siblings.

And so began the regime of daily Green Drinks; always nasty, though now and then just barely endurable, if she accidentally put in too much pineapple juice. A whole winter went by to be followed by the addition of a juicer and hideous celery juice cocktails, another wickedly bitter beverage that we were told to drink all summer long "to keep you cool".

Thank goodness Mama was mostly disinterested in food, unless it was candy, cake or ice cream, because by the following winter the blender was retired to a back cabinet and we were Green Drink-free. Of  course, we'd moved to the city that summer.  There's nothing like moving into a new house to ring in new routines. I suspect Daddy hated Green Drink as much as the rest of us - I never saw him willingly eat a green vegetable except peas.  Green Drink went down in the family lexicon as the epitome of cruel punishment - a reference that carried the threat of misery and also exemplified the awfulness of Mama's cooking - I mean - in addition to the butterscotch chips in the pumpkin pie.  What WAS she thinking?

Her reply - when we threw it in her face was "that was the year none of you had a single cold" which was another reason we hated Green Drink. What child doesn't want an excuse to stay home from school - and a cold? A cold doesn't even hurt all that much and if your throat is sore you get ice cream for lunch!

Fast forward a few decades and one day I began to think about Green Drink.  No. Wait. I began to crave Green Drink. I know. Don't ask me. I haven't any idea where that urge came from but it prompted me to buy a blender, some pineapple juice and some green vegetables.  It took very little tinkering with the recipe to make it into something quite tasty. And you don't have to stick with pineapple juice - not a particular favorite of mine. You can use milk, almond milk, Greek yogurt (my go-to choice right now), V8 fusion lite - if you don't mind artificial sweeteners. And if the store's greens are a little sad looking there are frozen greens and if you use the frozen ones you end up with a green Slurpee.

They call them green smoothies nowadays - but in the Haile House it's called Green Drink. A few years ago Baby Sister was visiting and I offered to make her one. The look she gave me was so bitter it would have frozen a soul less closely connected.  Big sisters are immune to suspicious stares. "Really - I promise - it's good. It was just Mama's awful sense of taste that made it so bad" I assured her and she acquiesced - reluctantly.

The look of delight on her face was marvelous - it erased forever that sad, cornered little birthday girl of memories. At least - it pulled the thorn out of her heart.

Green Drink is a bit tedious to make on a regular basis because the blender is the devil to clean. I'll be glad when this one wears out so I can get a cheap one that I can just put in the dishwasher. The scorned health benefits, otoh, are so welcome. Every year ThePrince and/or I have sore throats and colds by Christmas week so this year I made the decision. We will have a Green Drink every day in December.  We have missed a day or two so far, but 18 out or 20 ain't bad. And there's one in the blender right now. He likes his warmed, I like mine icy. And neither of us has had a sniffle or a cough or a sore throat - in spite of the Germs of December.

So - once again Mama proved right. Not in practice, no, but in theory - and that's good enough for me.

Thanks, Mama.

Real Gifts - More Mama Christmas Memories

I'm all through with dootiful activities for the year and this is giving me time to sink indulgently into  Christmas Brain - which, this year, includes More Mama Christmas Memories.  I am one of those disgustingly cheerful Christmas celebrants who never gets enough Christmas music, enough Christmas tree, enough Christmas cards. I love it all and I loved it all from the very beginning. I get ready for Christmas all the way up to Christmas Day and then... I stop.

But I don't think Mama was such a Christmas gal. Not that she was ever depressed or grumpy or short tempered at that time. She just seemed a wee bit detached from it all. And for all that we talked about everything, I don't believe I ever asked her outright if she liked Christmas.  I am sure it's because I couldn't believe anybody would not like Christmas. Sort of like I can't really believe in sailing - I mean - when the wind blows from the South, how is it you can also sail south - even if it's only south-ish. Or flying. How can a 50 ton airplane fly? I know how it does. I demonstrated it to my boy scouts 30 years ago. But do I believe? Believe? Well. There you have it. We can know what we don't believe.

What I know, though, and believe, is that Mama was gentle and indulgent with us about Christmas. I remember the first time I ever went shopping for Christmas presents. One of the bigger stores had a corner blocked off with a wall decorated like a gingerbread house. It had a little low door that only children could get through and we traipsed in to find, not a witch, but some pretty girls dressed as elves and lots of small things scattered about that you could purchase for tiny bits of money. We went in with a list of recipients and whatever cash we had. The pretty elf girl helped us pick from among a treasure store of things  we'd never seen before - never even imagined - to give as gifts.  I don't remember a thing I bought but I do remember the experience. It was magic. It was Daddy who took us. He was the shopper in the family. He was also the one who would get emotionally ratcheted up till he would crack and we'd have a Christmas Crisis. But he loved Christmas like I did. There never was a year he didn't tell us "we're going to have a smaller Christmas than last year" and then shop like a mad man, heaping the toy piles higher and higher.

Which might go a long way towards explaining why Mama was so ... um... detached through the holidays. Somebody had to be the grownup in that house.

When we were living on the Southside (in the Palace off of Jhanke Rd) we shopped for Christmas at Southside Plaza. Mama would give us $5 because each of us had to buy 5 presents. Once at the shopping center we'd head first to Woolworths and if we didn't find everyone a present there we'd move on to G.C. Murphy & Co. But with riches like we were spending, there was lots to choose from.

I remember selecting a blue glass bottle, shaped like a poodle, filled with bubble bath, for Mama one year. I loved dogs. I loved blue. I loved bubble bath - so surely this would be the best gift for Mama. Evidently she had a tender spot for it too, since she kept the bottle long after it was empty.

I am guessing this was purchased around 1961 because the summer I was 9 I was deep in the Little House books and that Christmas I asked Mama if:

1. We could have long flannel nightgowns instead of pajamas and
2. Could we have an Old Fashioned Christmas and make our own gifts that year?

I can still feel the moment - the hopeful wonder - the breathlessness as I waited for her answer - which was an indulgent "Yes".  God knows what awful gifts I made for my sisters and parents in those early years but the experience left a lasting impact. To this day - if I didn't make it - no matter how much I spend on it - it's not a Real Gift. And of course, the spur of giving real gifts only made me work hard till I actually got good at making things. And even more of course - I will also buy gifts now and consider them real. Just not as real.

It was about this time that she gave all the cousins little cloth bags she had made, filled with drawing paper, crayons, scotch tape and round edged scissors.  It was the scissors that caused the disgruntled complaints to issue from aunts and uncles. One unsuspecting aunt later muttered in my presence "Who was it who gave those scissors last year? I could kill her. What a mess they made."

I was a famous blabbermouth, but that time, I did not speak up.

The most hilarious Christmas morning I ever experienced was the year I was 11. We'd moved into the city by then and my little sisters were in school; kindergarten and 1st grade. My youngest sister was an unusual child - precocious beyond belief and yet - with such odd ideas. Sometimes she utterly drove me batty but just as often I was enormously proud of her. That year, though, the kindergarten teacher had them collect leaves and bring a bottle cap to school. They glued the cap in the center of a paper plate and then glued the leaves around it. The whole was spray painted gold and the intended result was supposed to be a Christmas Candle Holder.

Of course - one must remember that all of the gluing had been done by a 6 year old. I am sure she used that peppermint scented paste that came in a jar. And the gift was sent home from school in a brown grocery bag for the child to wrap. An odd shape - a fragile object - Sister knew it needed to be carefully packaged. She used a cardboard box that Daddy's shirts came from the cleaners in - and she padded the gift with ... the trash from the bathroom trash can.

I told you - she was unusual.

A week of drying out in our warm house, lying beneath the tree, being picked up and shaken - for I am sure she was as proud as punch about making a Real Gift for Mama and displayed it frequently - did nothing to keep it intact. On Christmas day we sat and watched as Mama opened up the box - and began pulling out used tissues, a Reese's candy wrapper, and other assorted bits of gold flecked clutter, a crumpled paper plate with glue splotches on it - Oh La. I will never, ever forget the look on Mama's face: Her mouth an open "O", her brain feverishly trying to decide if this was a joke or a Real Gift. 

As the sisters and Daddy began to laugh (I'm actually laughing with tears rolling down my cheeks as I write this.) Baby Sister began to cry - realizing the completeness of her fiasco. Oh my goodness. Christmas. What is Christmas without a disaster or two? I do remember that Mama quickly recovered, hugged her nutty baby, and promised that she would help her re-glue everything and make it perfect.

I do not remember that I ever saw a candle in that holder but I do realize now that Mama taught me an important lesson that day. She showed me that the gift isn't the item. It's not the ring, or the dress, or the perfume. The gift is the time a person takes to think about you - contemplate your joy - long for your happiness - show you are worth stopping a busy day for. That is the real thing about gifts. That's what makes them Real Gifts.

I Ache. Therefore I Am - Missing Mama at Christmas

I have three friends who lost their mamas this same year that I was made an orphan. Each of us is facing our first Christmas without this essential hub.  If they ache as much as I do there must be a whole lotta achin' goin' on right now.  And yet - these ladies had such magnificent mamas - almost as pinnacle-like as mine - that they have to also be having the most wonderful Christmas memories floating to the surface.  I thought I'd try to list some of mine so that I have them down on virtual paper - I might even add to them as the years go by and the fleeting bits of code surface into my consciousness.

Of course, my first two memories take place at Christmas time - the trip to Florida after I'd burned my leg so badly and opening up the pink box with its cellophane window revealing Tiny Tears and all her miniature accouterments. Both Daddy and Mama were vivid in the car memory but only Mama is present in that memory of looking through the clear window and seeing that perfect babydoll. I was on the floor. Mama was behind me to my left. She told me it was 1953 so I was about 13 months old at the time.

Some memories are eternal.

My next Christmas memory had to have been before I was 5 because Sister and I were still sleeping in the downstairs bedroom. I came out of our room on Christmas morning and there was what looked like a brand new Tiny Tears sitting in a Real Baby Carriage - and I asked Mama why Santa thought I needed a second doll? She laughed and said it was my own Tiny Tears but I didn't believe her. I had to go back to my bed to see if she was still where I'd left her when I went to sleep the night before. Nope. The doll in the carriage was my very own baby.

Who knew how good a great vehicle could make a girl look?

I remember the Christmas my youngest sister was born. Daddy had to leave town on some urgent family business only days after Mama came home from the hospital. What I remember about Mama was how angry she was that he was leaving. What I remember about ME was how happy I was that my beloved godmother, Aunt Ann, was coming to stay with us. Mama had gotten a brand new all wool Oriental Rug (purchased, I am sure, from Miller and Rhodes) as a Christmas present. Walking barefoot on that rug was pure heaven. It was the softest thing my feet had ever felt. My aunt was going to cook an egg for my other younger sister when Mama called her from the bedroom. I, auntie's little shadow, stayed in the kitchen, transfixed by that white oval. I was thinking about a Saturday cartoon I'd seen of a hen, sitting in a nest on her egg, knitting and clucking the skater's waltz till the egg suddenly hatched and a little round yellow chick popped out. I began to wonder if I could make a little round yellow chick pop out of that egg on the kitchen counter. I cast about in my mind to think of something that would be soft enough to hatch a baby chick on.

Yes. You can finish that story all by yourself.

Those Christmases in that little starter home were all about the toys and the babies. I certainly remember how perfect they all were - and there are home movies of us starting about 1958 - which I believe is the year we got the pogo stick. All I really remember about Mama during that time was that she always put the tree inside the babies' play pen - which kept it from being pulled down by crawlers and toddlers, but also kept Me, the Big Girl, Who Knew Better, from getting my hands on the tree. I was glad when we no longer had babies in the house at Christmas time.

I also remember the year Daddy took us to the television station to see Santa. This is the only time I ever remember going to see Santa ... though perhaps there were other years. The gimmick was that one parent could stay home and watch her child on TV and find out what she wanted for Christmas. I am sure I got exactly what I wanted that year.

The Palace Off of Jhanke Road

Without a doubt, though, the most important Christmas Memory Of Mama didn't even happen at Christmas time. Late in the summer of 1959 we moved from Henrico to Chesterfield county - from our little brick house off Skipwith to the palace off of Jhanke Road.  In the hustle and bustle of pulling things out and packing them into moving vans all the Christmas stuff was brought into the open.  You must remember, as Jean Shepherd says, Christmas is the pivot around which the child's year rotates. I spent a lot of time as we adjusted to the new house, thinking about Christmas. One day I heard Mama out in the hall, putting clean towels into the linen closet (I told you - this was a Palace of a house - it had a whole closet just for sheets and towels!!!) and I wondered if there really was a Santa Clause. I decided to ask Mama - and if she said "yes" then I would know there really was a Santa and if she said anything else at all - I would know that Santa was really our parents.

And so I asked. And she thought a moment before answering .... a deadly sign .... and then asked me "Well. What do you think?"

And I knew. And I said - "there isn't a Santa"

And there was a moment - a tee tiny prick of disappointment - and then the wonder of our parents buying that much stuff for us kids .. parents who NEVER bought stuff for us - who ALWAYS told us to save our allowances - whose only response to a request for any sort of impulse purchase was "that's nothing but junk" - the thought of those two grownups going out and buying, not just whatever we'd asked for, but heaps of things we hadn't even dreamed of - plus gobs of candy and frittery things like those spinning Christmas trees that opened when they were going fast enough, to reveal a little metal Santa - that was a miracle light years beyond some elf sliding down a chimney in a house that didn't even have a chimney. (although the New Palace had two chimneys and two fireplaces!!!)

Wow. I mean - WOW! That was the real magic of Christmas. It was the season when constant No Sayers did an about face and said YES!

And best of all - once I knew that first grown-up truth, I realized I'd put one toe into the magic kingdom of adulthood - that longed for Shangri La where I would one day get to live - that world where I would be in charge.  There was still a lot of little girl in my almost 7 year old self, but it was only scant years before I was folded into the Christmas making part of things; when I was carried along to help with the shopping and the wrapping; when I could be a true Santa Elf.

A mama's real job is to help her children develop into functioning, capable, independent adults and that August afternoon my own precious Mama helped me make that giant step forward. It's a memory I cherish.

There are other Christmas memories that involve Mama and I will be back to write about them soon because I am 62. I am ever so slightly afraid that I will begin to lose these bits of code - that they will degrade to the point they can't be retrieved and I think that would be a great loss.