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A Little Bit of Holiday Sparkle
Sparkle is one of the things I love about this season, the glitter on ornaments, white tree lights shining through the night, silvery white snowflakes falling on our world. The sparkle helps me beat back the dark, the literal dark of our shortened days here in the Puget Sound region, and the dark that comes on the heels of tragic new stories or simply with missing people I love.
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Memories & Coffee
My mom would have been 69 yesterday. I spent her birthday traveling home to Everett from Catawba Island, Ohio. Hard not to think about her there, surrounded by family and friends who adored her too, and surrounded by the beauty of a precious place that holds so many memories from over the years. Like all good family soap operas, some of those memories are bittersweet, but most of them are the kind of warm, happy scenes you wrap up carefully and hold close in your heart until you can return, or in case you never do. My mom loved that place. Who wouldn’t? A tiny, hidden stretch of gorgeous land…
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My Mom’s Shrimp Scampi
One evening about two weeks before my mom died, after helping her get comfortable in bed, I walked out into our living room to my aunts’ shrimp scampi. Our nine-foot long table was full of people, Aunt Trish, Aunt Mimi and Uncle Tim had arrived that week from Ohio to say their goodbyes to my mom. My 3 1/2 year-old daughter, Lily, and my 15 month-old son, Jasper, were there; I know Greg, my husband, was there because he was there through it all with me, my mom’s sickness, her death and after. I honestly can’t remember if my brother and his wife were there yet with their 2 1/2 year…
