Christmas 2020

     It's Christmas Eve as I write but will be Christmas Day when you read what I am writing. 
    I have cut a tree from the forest and decorated it with my decades-old ornaments.The paper star that goes on top was made by my son forty years ago. 

    I do miss Mike. Christmases were always fun with him, usually at my house. Last year, we started working a diabolically difficult jigsaw puzzle my sister had given us: the skyline of New York, in anticipation of our planned trip there last spring. Of course, that didn't happen, coronavirus and cancer both conspiring against it.

    I will be by myself this Christmas but not alone, as I'll Zoom with my son and his family and will talk with my sisters. I'll make chicken Wellington for dinner, with bourbon-glazed carrots on the side. I'll have a simple panna cotta for dessert and maybe a piece of Harry and David's chocolates from the gift box my siblings sent me. I have many gifts under the tree. I feel surrounded with love.

    Tonight I opened a bottle of very good Cabernet Sauvignon that was supposed to be for us both. I raised a glass to Mike and asked him how the wine is wherever he is these days. 

    It wasn't too many years ago that I was falling in love with Mike. Here is a poem from my new book of poems, From Friend to Wife to Widow: Six Brief Years, which is my tribute to the man who brought me so much happiness, who deepened and broadened my life in the last six years. There was a whole lot of love between us.

I Knew I Loved You When

I knew I loved you 

when 

before you left

one morning

you chopped my kindling

and again

when

you brought me flowers

one non-occasion day of winter

and especially

when 

one late December day

you agreed to trim

my Christmas tree

and didn't fling the tinsel on,

as you intended

(your style)

but, sipping Zin,

watched me

meticulously bend

tinsel

over each limb,

and, the job ended,

said,

"The tree is splendid

with carefully tended

fastidiously rendered

icicle-pretended

tinsel."

    I am wishing all my readers a good Christmas Day and that the new year will bring us all the kind of happiness the world was so stingy with for most of 2020. Spread love. Spread peace. Spread happiness.