It's coming around again

The Christmas presents have been opened. The Carpenters’ Christmas album (thank you, Holly) is playing on the record player. Breakfast has been eaten.

What’s left of my family, the good people, are together today and all is right with the world. For many years, neither my sister nor I were sure we would ever have Christmases like this. We are blessed now that we do.

Has the universe, or God, been arranging something? I wonder today.

When I was about 10 years old, my wicked stepfather came across the country for a visit to his children, my brother and sister. Today I forego any detailed dark stories about childhood, but the knowledge that it was dark is necessary context.

He was a talented glassblower, a true artist. Making his living blowing electrodes, he created intricate miniatures in glass that could have been, should have been, in the finest galleries. Weeping willows with every branch defined in literal threads of glass. Perfect tea pots and cups, vials with stoppers suitable for magical potions. You can’t imagine how beautiful they were.

As a child I had an obsession with huge jewels. The Hope Diamond. The Devil’s Eye from the Disney picture The Rescuers. Oh, how I wanted to plunge my hands into a Smaug’s trove full of (you must say it this way, like Madam Medusa, and all proper villainesses) jew-ELLz.

On that trip, my stepfather gave me a black velvet drawstring pouch. Inside were various “diamonds” in glass, cut with the perfect number of facets. I was entranced. These jew-ELLz fueled my fantasies; I lived in imaginary and magical worlds most of the time, by myself.

I don’t think she knew this, about my jewels. This morning, my sister gave me this.

Talent with words doesn’t help me describe the feeling this gave me.

She gave me something else that’s beyond easy description.

This is one of my mother’s wooden spoons from our childhood. It was used to stir spaghetti sauce (my mother’s spaghetti sauce is the best I’ve ever had, and I continue to try to duplicate it). It was used to sting our backsides. This is is one of those that did not break over one of our bottoms. The curve comes from years of mother slamming it in frustration and tears on the edge of the counter.

My sister quietly took it and stashed it in a box of mementos when she was nine years old, and has managed to keep it all this time. “I wanted to take it from her, and I wanted to make it mine,” my sister said to me this morning. “If she ever denied it, I planned to take it and tell her ‘I remember.’ Now I want you to have it.”

‘I know nothing stays the same, but if you’re willing to play the game, it’s coming around again

And I believe in love, now who knows where or when, but it’s coming around again.’

Merry Christmas.