Eve

The tree is up.

The table is set.

Oh, how I wish I took better pictures.

A co-worker work was fired, just days ago. I had my own threat this week. What’s my co-worker feeling, tonight?

I think of a benevolent woman I knew, deceased now. What a view of life she had. Her husband, upon learning his long career as a college professor would end with termination, took his own life. Some years later, her son ended an unimaginably cruel and unfair time in his life by shooting several people. His favor was quickly returned by local law enforcement.

In a Christmas card, this lady, my friend, wrote of seeing lights appear in neighborhood windows, of smelling cookies baking, about hanging her late-husband’s hand-made angel decorations, to the joy of her grandson. Naturally, she missed her husband and son, she wrote; yet, there IS joy in the air, and there IS hope, she concluded. Every Christmas, I put that note on my refrigerator.

I look out my window. In the dark, my little Tuscany isn’t visible, but a brightly-lit tree is, atop the same hill.

-PJ