Home for the holiday

So it turns out we will not be going to Antigua for the holidays after all, done in by air fares the price of college tuition, and that's before accommodations. Gone are the days when we just stayed in the home my husband grew up in. All the rooms there are occupied, so we four planned to rent a little cottage on the beach, were really looking forward to it, but somehow couldn't click the button that said buy, couldn't afford to click that button, no matter how hard we wished it, no matter how much my husband longed on this second Christmas without his mother to string colored lights on his dad's gallery and bake him a Christmas ham and say, look Pops, how your grandchildren are growing like small trees, sturdy and branching up and out into the world.

Some of my husband's extended family will be gathering in Antigua for the holidays, and we wanted to be there, to see people we hadn't seen in years, North Carolina in the house, and Canada and Barbados too, and I had also quietly hoped for reconciliations among the estranged, or at least the long silent, I thought if we could look into each others faces the love would be so clear, and everything hard would become soft again, and we would be healed. She would smile down on us, and we would all begin anew.

Instead we will be right here in New York City, bundled against the cold, dreaming of long ago Christmases that were perfect in their way. But we will be together, the four of us, and we will make this Christmas perfect in its way.

Winterberry holly on the High Line,  New York City