Thursday, December 24, 2015

A Letter to Danny ~ December 24, 2015

Merry Christmas Honey:

I'm sitting here watching the lights sparkle on the Christmas Tree, listening to my collection of Christmas music and missing you.  Four years have passed since you left, and four years isn't enough time to get over missing you.  I'm just remembering how patient you were with me when I insisted in putting up five Christmas Trees and even had lights on your old farm tractor.  "What a loon," you said yet proudly showed it off to family and neighbors.

Remember, our first Christmas Album was Johnny Mathis.  We listened to it over and over during the Christmas Season until I found Roger Whitaker.

I'm thinking of the few special moments honey.  Moments when everyone had left on Christmas Eve; when the food had been devoured, when wrapping paper and ribbons were what was left of the hours upon hours of shopping, hiding, wrapping and displaying, when you had had one more piece of your mince meat pie, when the night was dark and quiet and it was just the two of us.  There might have been a total of two hours then, two hours between Christmas Eve and Christmas morning when it would just be you and me sitting on the love seat, my leaning against you and you with your arm around my shoulders, watching the fire crackle in the fireplace.  "That's craziness," you would say and I would reply "Yep," and we would go off to bed to wait until morning when we would open our own packages from each other.  As I sit here right now, how I miss those two hour increments.  What I wouldn't give for just two more.

I hope if I can instill anything in our children and grandchildren, it will be not to take a minute, an hour, a day, a smile, a laugh for granted.  And for them not to count the importance of a day by it being a happy one.  Even the worrisome, sad, the hurtful, the mad, are important.  The worrisome, sad, the hurtful, the mad are those days by which they will grow.  It will be the happy ones where they will gain strength to grow again by whatever means.

Johnny Mathis is singing "Let it Snow", there's no mince meat pie since it was only you who liked it. There is food to be prepared and presents to wrap for tonight, and when it is all done, I will sit and miss you; our two hours.

I love you honey.  I miss you.  I hope when I start to drift off to sleep tonight, in the corner of my mind I will hear you whisper. "What a loon."

Longer than the 12th of Never.

Susie.