Every year I process this. It's getting better. Three years ago, I couldn't help my family decorate the tree. Last year, I didn't help actually place the ornaments, but I stayed in the room and untangled them and handed them to the girls. Grieving is such a slow process. I read my writings for the last 4 years and they dwell on the morose sometimes. This is really not my nature -- I'm much like Kaylee from the show Firefly and am usually too cheerful to live. But it's hard to look at pictures of Thanksgiving past and notice all the empty places. I can't look at the pictures and do the "do you remember?" game anymore -- because I don't want to remember, I just want them back.
I know that it's time for new traditions. This will be the first year that the Loving Husband's father will spend with his new wife. We had planned to go to their house for Thanksgiving, but Entropy is still too weak from rheumatic fever. We have been invited to friend's houses (3 different invitations) for Thanksgiving, but the Doctor tells me we need to keep Entropy home. So we will be home. Maybe that is a very good thing. Maybe that's what we need to go. Stay at home. Dwell in our own house for a while. Be intentional in the things we do with each other. Nurture each other. Put up the Advent wreath and the nativities. Go get a tree and decorate it. Find something "crafty" to do with the girls and create in the midst of our grief. Did you know that after Mt. St. Helen's exploded and blanketed the area with grey, heavy, suffocating ash -- after a while the plants came back? With extreme vigor and life? In 10 years, the area was richer with vegatation than it had been before -- all new growth, true, but the ashes of that death became fertilzer for the new growth? This is what I am going to dwell with this Thanksgiving. Thanks be to God.
*as proof of my extreme nostalgia -- I needed/wanted a new blender. I found this on ebay. I bid on it and won. It's your basic bulletproof blender.** And it's just like the one my Grandmama and my mama had when I was a kid. Yep, nostalgia.
** next I am going to look for a bulletproof waffle iron***, toaster and mixer. Good, solid metal appliances like my parents had that aren't like the "disposable" appliances you find now-a-days.
***funny story about a bullet proof waffle iron. Good friend was a small child in Alabama (always Alabama, you know, for these sorts of stories). Her daddy and granddaddy went ahuntin' (never a "g" at the end of that word). They just dumped their pockets out on the kitchen counter one night -- pocket knives and change and whatnot and ammo. Right next to the waffle iron. My friend was about 5 at the time. She noticed the ammo would fix into the waffle iron and spent some time making patterns in the grid. And then closed the lid -- with the ammo in the waffle iron. The next morning her grandmother plugged in the waffle iron. After it warmed up a little, the ammo went off and began to zing around the kitchen and the waffle iron grazed her grandmother in the hip. After they got back from the hospital, her grandmother**** cleaned up the waffle iron a little and made waffles. THAT'S bulletproof.
****actually, in retrospect, I wonder if it was the waffle iron that was bulletproof, or the grandmother.....
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