TAPS FOR CHRISTMAS

By MICHAEL PERKINS

By MICHAEL PERKINS

I HAVE BEEN LUCKY ENOUGH TO LIVE TO THE AGE OF SEVENTY-ONE before having to type this sentence:

This will be my first Christmas without my mother.

It’s amazing how long my fingers floated frozen over the keyboard getting that said, but I have to filter all the poignant events of this one year through the lens of her having made it through nearly ninety-one of her own. Memories are odd things; they take whatever form best matches our needs. Sometimes she is with me in the recitation of a family saying, complete with the sound of her voice. Other times, she flashes up in front of me unbidden, summoned through some bizarre daisy chain of impressions that can spring from any and everywhere. Bang, she’s here again. Whiff, she’s gone once more.

We were always a family of picture-takers, and so there is ample documentation of her face at every age, from the crib through her “career” as a high-school majorette to her happiest role, that of a wife to my father for over seventy-two years. Sometimes, in this first year in which she has left an empty chair at the table, I can comfort myself with those images, looking directly into her face. Other times, like this entire month of December, I have to make it through by buffering the reality of her absence a little, “seeing” her in the things she loved.

She loved this season, and filled her house with generations of laughs, tears, parties and celebrations, adding more elegant elements to each succeeding Christmas season. And what you see here were her greatest pride, the “regiment” of nutcrackers she had amassed over thirty-plus years. Each had its story: each was attached to its giver in an unbreakable chain of smiles and remembrance.

This year, the troops were finally retired on the family mantel, perhaps after their bugler has quietly rendered “Taps”, replaced by my sister’s collection of angels, a visual cue that the torch has been passed and Christmas is in the hands of yet another trustworthy caretaker. After this emotionally supercharged month, I will gradually go back to the photos, back to making direct eye contact with that unbelievably beautiful and comforting face. But now, I will have, as the song goes, a merry “little” Christmas, looking again on her handiwork, both in the things she created and the people she adored.

It will be enough.

It will have to be.