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| Designed and Built by EMR |
Fifteen years later, as I round the corner of her home for my yearly, long-weekend visit, I look up the hill and see a wooden bench I don’t remember set against the shrubbery and briefly think it’s an unlikely place as the bench tilts slightly downhill.
I remember as a child breathing in the piney fragrance of our Christmas tree, the living room lamps turned off so pastel-colored globes of light softly illuminated decorations and shimmering tinsel. I remember our older daughter’s skis and the six-room doll house that their dad built for our much younger daughter under the Christmas tree years later. And then, from the time when only she and I were left living at home, I remember the quietude of night as I shoveled deep snow at ten o’clock, flakes drifting through a streetlamp’s light, and each time I straightened to rest my back, looking at the wreath and red bow on the lit front door. Many years later, visiting her for a week, now a mother herself, she had helped me buy an iPod and put on ten songs; and although it was months before Christmas, one that I had chosen was I’ll Be Home for Christmas. I was listening to it, waiting to leave for the airport and my flight to India when I heard the full line, “I’ll be home for Christmas, if only in my dreams,” and suddenly feeling sad, my tears had come. Seeing this, she’d wrapped her arms around me, holding on.
In India on December first, I put a pop-up crèche card, an angel, a snowman, a ceramic crèche, three elves of wood, and a circle of crystal petals on my kitchen table, adding red hibiscus on Christmas Day. At carol singing on Christmas Eve, I’m in the crowd overflowing the open porch of the prayer building into the shadows of pole lights on the upper hill. But my favorite activity has begun months before—designing a card.
I ask about the wooden bench. My oldest grandson—who has developed into a quiet, gentle conversationalist with me, initiating conversations in which I learn of what is important to him and how he sees life—tells me that he designed and made it. I couldn’t be more surprised and now understand why it’s a prominent display at the front of the home. From the gravel path I observe the practicality of the wide arms and the perfect construction. Getting a pot of his mom’s Christmas cactus, I center it on the bench and take photos, knowing I’ve found this year’s card. A thought will come much later, that Jesus was a carpenter, bringing a deeper feeling for the real meaning of Christmas, of the newborn birthed many years ago.
My realization is, “To be open to discovering others is to enrich our own lives.”