Last night
as the sun was setting I went out to clear off my car. It was 40 degrees
outside, so I decided to go for a walk. I was never that good at building
snowmen, but this was good packing snow, so I picked some up as I walked and
made a snowball. It was so smooth and
cold, it felt like marble. I tossed it up and down in my hand like a tennis
ball as I walked, thinking about playing in the snow as a kid. I thought about
my dad, who died three years ago today. What was going on in the world then…it
was a couple of months after the earthquake in Haiti, a month before the big BP
oil spill. In some ways it feels longer ago; in other ways it doesn’t seem like
it’s been three years ago. I read an article in a women’s magazine in the gym a
few days ago about a woman who had a massive stroke at the age of 41.
Amazingly, she survived and got better with only a few minor ill effects. But
for months she had to move back in with her parents. I paused on the exercise
bike, wondering uneasily what I would do if that happened to me? When we were
little, on Valentine’s Day my sister and I would wake up to piles of gifts and
Whitman’s chocolates covering the dining room table – from the “Valentine
frog,” my parents always said with a wink. Santa and the Easter Bunny had us
fooled for a long time, but we always knew the Valentine Frog was my dad. One
time my sister spilled her entire box of Whitman’s all over the floor, and my
dad drove to four different stores until he finally found one that had a box
left for her.
Wherever he
and Mom were, that was home.
