My dear readers, I must thank you for being patient with me for the past week, as I haven’t been writing. I’ve had a bit of writer’s block, as well as difficulty focusing. It’s probably because the holiday season is upon us, and this time of year used to be one of my favorites, in spite of the cold. I’ve always prepared a big Thanksgiving feast, whether it was for a bunch of rapscallions, also known as Sailors (both American and British!), my Italian family, or my blood family. After that, I began to get in the mood for Christmas and I truly enjoyed all of the hustle and bustle, the lights, the music… and then, Grubby died.
Grubby was even bigger on Christmas than I was! If I had given him his way, our house would have looked like a cross between “A Christmas Vacation” and “Christmas with the Kranks”. He would have put so many lights and decorations on the house that the three wise men very likely would have thought it was the Star of Bethlehem and showed up as we were watching “A Christmas Story” or “Love Actually”, wondering why we had three furbabies wrapped in blankets instead of a naked little boy!
This year will be the second holiday season without Grubby. I can listen to the music and kind of enjoy it, but as for enjoying the hustle and bustle and the lights… honestly, they all exhaust me; they deplete me. Despite this, I still see reasons and signs to hope that one day I will find that excitement that I once had. My latest sign has come from my orchid of all things!
I don’t want to sound like all is lost, as it isn’t. For Thanksgiving, Abby and I will be spending it with Steve, Shana, Hallie, Connor, and Connie! Steve has informed us that he is trying some sort of sorcery in the kitchen this year and brining his turkey in pickle juice!!! I will probably buy some extra cranberry sauce in a can (the kind that is jellied and shaped like the can) just in case!
Christmas, Grubby’s birthday, and New Year’s will all be spent with Mom and Dad on a long cruise to the Southern Caribbean, and I am definitely looking forward to that. We even have personalized matching t-shirts for sail away and matching PJs for Christmas Brunch! This will be our second Christmas cruise, and although I don’t know if it will become a new tradition for Abby and me, I know that it was a great way to spend the week last year and Abby told me she didn’t need to open a bunch of presents if she was on a ship!
I am looking forward to spending these times with my family, but it isn’t the same without Grubby. Instead of being brightly colored reds, greens, and blues, I feel as though I see everything through muted pastels and shades of gray, and I miss the brightness.
Those of you who have been reading from the beginning, and even those who have gone back through the blog archives know that my orchid is as stubborn as me! In the two and a half years that I have had it, it has refused to bloom and refused to die (thankfully, as it turns out!)! I have repotted it. I have moved it from different windows. I have sprayed it with some sort of magic orchid spray that is supposed to make it bloom, and instead of stems, all I have gotten are new leaves and roots reaching up to the sky like some kind of sun-worshipping Druid orchid!!! One day last week, I noticed that something different appeared to be reaching out toward the window. Upon further inspection, and confirmation from my BFF and resident orchid master, John, it appears that my orchid is finally going to reveal itself to me after all!
Yesterday, I gently staked the stem, and I realized that the simple knowledge that my orchid was really getting ready to start blooming gave me hope – hope that one day, I will start blooming again too!
Very well written. I can see at times that you are growing through this things that has happened to You.