It appears that this year has finally caught up with me… last March – 85% of my home was destroyed in a flood.  My son and I were cooped up in a hotel for 3 months and, as anyone who has been through something like that can testify – you spend days sorting through old sentimental items, some destroyed and some salvageable, and each making you wonder what the heck is wrong with you for caring so much about some letter, picture, piece of fabric… it sucks.Sometimes these things are what we have left, to touch or read or look at, of some special time in our lives or to remember a lost loved one.  Something tangible that helps you connect to that memory.  My dad’s burgundy velour shirt and the smell of Old Spice… I couldn’t have been more then 6, but I remember hugging him in that shirt and breathing in his cologne… thinking he was the most wonderful man in the world.

So, the year is topped off with the loss of my grandmother – my last living biological grandparent… and I see, for the first time, this woman who was so much to so many people… outside of the context of who she was to me… my Grammie.  A smiling laughing beautiful girl full of hope, a world war II nurse, mother of 4, married and divorced and married again when you just didn’t do that… oldest sister to 5 impossible boys and one baby sister at the end of the pack of wild men… friend, volunteer, historian… 

I hope during this holiday season, we each take time to know each other in that big context… and to give everyone we love a big hug and remember it… your own respective velour shirt and big breath of Old Spice.