There was this one day, just a few days before Thanksgiving, when I was around 13. I was at my Meme and Papa's house just lounging in the recliner with a bowl of rice and Little House on the Prairie on the television. Life was grand.
Then the phone rang. *insert creepy JAWS music* (Fair warning, nothing scary happened, you can sit back in your seat.)
Back to the ringing phone. My way too tired 13-year-old bones just couldn't manage to get up to get the phone that WAS STILL ATTACHED TO THE WALL, so my sweet Meme picked it up. She said "okay" and "mmhmm" a few times and then hung up the phone. Then came the dreaded words. "Kacie, Linda needs you to go help her do something." What!? Me!? Get up!? PLEASE NOOOO!!! (So I was a slightly dramatic teenager, I think I grew out of that most days.)
I drug myself out of the recliner, slower than most snails move on a bad day, and walked (or crawled and pouted, not really sure which) the 100 yards to my Aunts house.
You see, Linda had cancer. The bad kind. She wasn't supposed to live very long. At this point she had outlived herself by about 6 years. But the cancer was still there, and between the cancer itself and all of the meds her bones were very brittle and her body ached constantly.
So on this day that I made my regular trip to see what she needed help with I kind of talked myself in to being in a bad mood. I opened the sliding glass door and walked in to her kitchen with an annoyed look on my face, one I'm sure my daddy would have commented on, "I sure hope your face doesn't freeze like that", and there she was. Glowing, beaming, radiant. No, literally. She had Christmas lights thrown over her shoulders like some kind of fancy shawl.
With most adults, a sight like this could be kind of surprising. With Linda, not so much. I mean, this was the woman who once talked in a baby voice for so long she began to do it unintentionally. Anything for a laugh.
So, after a good five minutes I got her untangled from all of the little glowing bulbs and I asked what else she needed me to do, like I really believed getting her loosened from the beautiful electric death trap of Christmas was really what she called me up here for.
Unfortunately, or fortunately, that was just the beginning.
Linda really liked Christmas. Like, more than Patrick Swayze liked pelvic
thrusting in Dirty Dancing. Like, A LOT. She wanted to decorate early and in a big way, against my Uncles urging her to not decorate early...or at all. This year I guess Linda was tired of arguing with my Uncle on when she could decorate, and it was always an argument because she couldn't maneuver the stairs to the attic to get the millions of boxes down, that was his job. Well this year it became my job.
I drug box after box after box down the stairs. There were trees and lights and tinsel and ornaments and glass figurines and blah blah blah.
I remember starting to get even more annoyed when I had to go back and look for another box because one little group of ornaments was missing and Lord forbid us not put these 12 Angel ornaments on the tree because that would throw off the look of the big abominable ornament blob that sat in the corner of the living room. (There was a tree under there, I know, I drug it down the stairs and put it together. There was no proof of said tree at this point though.)
Regardless, Linda wanted them so I got them.
Three hours later the house looked like a Winter Wonderland. It was beautiful. And Linda, well she was beaming...again...this time from pure joy.
Linda has now been gone 5 1/2 years but this day, it will forever be one of my favorite days. It started a tradition. Every year after that until her last Christmas I spent my Thanksgiving break creating her own version of the North Pole.
Every year since her last Christmas was us has been hard, but I always feel her stronger during this time. Especially when I hang those 12 Angel ornaments on my tree in my home.
