Tonight is the Silent Night

Winding around dark streets of our old neighborhood Friday night, on the way home from our favorite Greek restaurant ... all the lights festooned on bushes and eaves make it a different world. Really a much prettier place than this neighborhood usually is.

Yesterday, running around to the grocery store, to the office supplies store, coming home to hurriedly get in my one contribution to holiday cooking this year: stars, trees, angels, Christmas cookies all in white frosting with red sprinkles (not my best decorating effort), watching "Bells of St. Mary's" and falling into bed exhausted.

Today we'll go to Macrina bakery to pick up a traditional Almond Cake for tomorrow's dinner at Mary Anne's, I'll pack my perfumes while making the Italian fish soup, Cioppino, which we'll eat in celebration of Christmas Eve, then -- as my favorite part of the holiday descends, the peace and quiet of everything shutting down on the most silent night of the year, we'll watch "It's a Wonderful Life" ... and spare some thought for this, our last Christmas in this place.

I have lived here with Jim for five years, he's lived here 18 years. Never the most aesthetic abode, it was nonetheless a place of comfort and safety for me. I came here on emotionally shaky ground and found a man who went a long way toward healing my hurt heart, my skewed mind. How much he's taught me, and all he's given me, can't be enumerated here. He raised his son -- now a man with an intense intellect and a good heart who's built his own life -- here. Our dear Asta lived and died here (her ashes will come with us to the new house). Bucky -- fearful, snappish and anxious -- joined us here, and became the sweet, loyal, beautiful boy he now is to us. I gained a new livelihood and found my first job in it here.

I am sorry to leave, eager to go.

Christmas holiday intensifies whatever emotion is now in your life. This year, I feel grateful, rich, sad, excited, melancholy, eager ... but gratitude is the dominant emotion. Thank you God, for all you have given me.

Merry Christmas to all who celebrate her ... and the Happiest of Holidays to all.