A Christmas Card

Dear Tom,

Season's greetings from your Aunt Celia. Hope your family is well and in high spirits going into this joyful time of year.

I'm doing okay. It's been two years since Ted's death but I still think of him daily and miss him terribly. Sharon and Will have both moved out of state now so I've no family in town, and that can be hard.

Recently, I've met a man who stops by to keep me company twice a week. We usually have lunch or dessert together and visit for an hour or two before he heads back home. It's something to look forward to. I'm not ready, just yet, to think of anything outside of a friendship. My friend has been a widower going on four years and says he too just enjoys having a companion.

It's different when you're older, Tom. You seek human touch and human connection, but intimacy carries a different patina. It's gentle and soft and simple, and doesn't come with the trappings of youthful courtship. I don't rule out loving a man again, but the pace at which I move in that direction is terribly slow and meandering.

I have lots of time these days to look back on my life, and I see, with surprise, such a different existence than I imagined for myself when I was a 22 year old leaving the University and planning life's great adventure. I had wanted to work in the Peace Corp, which was just getting started back then, but during my interview the people there said they didn't feel my skills corresponded to any needs in the developing world.

It was just as well. I wasn't pursuing it altruistically. I wanted to throw myself into the unknown for the thrill of it and nothing more. It was a selfish pursuit. I think we should leave such noble endeavors to those who are drawn to human suffering and need, with an innate desire to address it.

After the Peace Corp rejection, I thought of becoming a writer, but lacked the discipline and drive such a lonesome pursuit demands. And I never intended to marry so young, but met Ted and fell in love, and, in that dizzy state, I abandoned plans for most everything outside of living happily ever after.

Ted and I were wed on my 25th birthday. We bought a house and he took a job as a local college admissions director. I would have liked to have put my English major to  good use but slipped all too easily into the role of new mother, happy, at least temporarily, to be at home, writing my awkward poetry and short stories, participating in book clubs, and occasionally volunteering at the library.

You always think there will be time for adventure later on in life. Maybe for some there is, but there is also something that changes in a person in later years. Life becomes something different than pulsating possibility and potential. It becomes a story, a tale of weighing pain and gain. You begin, slowly, to make peace with loss, and ultimately, to write a new book about who and what you are and what you'll leave behind, what story, what moral. Such literature  doesn't  stem from exotic trips overseas as much as long nights alone in one's bedroom.

As an older woman now, I've come to see that life often happens to us, no matter how hard we try to be the ones who happen to life. Yes, we make our choices, but they are made in a vast sea of the choices of others, all swirling about, and somewhere, there is a force that has made choices even before those, and we live with them as well. We are captains of our ship, but it's not our ocean and it's not our wind

I'm glad I was a mother and a wife. I'm sorry that I gave up certain dreams and made compromises that I told myself early on I'd never make. But I have learned that the care-free young woman, who walked from that University auditorium with her diploma in hand, had learned little in her years behind a school desk. She had not yet begun her education. Her young heart seemed but two dimensional and her young mind too sure of itself for her own good. I miss certain feelings she had, and joys she felt, and the way she jumped out of bed in the morning. But she would be of little use to me today.

Tom, what I wish for you this holiday season is a chance to make peace with the still faint calls of youth and the looming beckon of old age. Peace can be difficult to find in the midst of such confusing tension, but the way to find it is to remember that the sun shines as brightly on the first day of spring as on the last day of autumn. Circumstances surrounding that bright light shift continuously but its burning force remains the same--strong and steady.

Keep a vigil on your soul, and its steady burn, Tom. Here's wishing you and your family a blessed Christmas, and a New Year filled with wonder, serenity and delight.

Write to me soon. I miss hearing from you.

With much love.

Aunt Celia