The “snowstorm” on Monday produced about five to six inches of snow. It has been a delight for the dogs as they love to play in it. They wrestle, they chase each other, they eat the snow, with no mind to how cold it is. Luckily we have a fenced in backyard, so when I get cold, I can come in and watch them from the comfort of being inside. When they want to return to the warmth of the house, it is a major ordeal getting them cleaned up and dry. Murray’s poodle-like fur causes the snow to ball up in his paws, and those miniature clumps are next to impossible to get out. Needless to say the floor needs a good mopping. Maybe later. Not now.

I haven’t been able to really walk them or go for runs as most everything is closed. I guess it is a good respite from my daily routines, but I do miss taking them for our daily jaunts out and about. Given that I have had some free time on my hands, and it is the holiday season, my mind begins to drift backwards in time. When I put up the Christmas tree last week, I enjoyed looking at all of the ornaments that I’ve collected through the years. A lot of them have come from students, and a lot of them have come from my travels. Whenever I go on vacation, I try and buy something for the tree. When I was in Arizona this past fall, I purchased a cactus ornament adorned with little Christmas lights.

Putting up the tree also brings with it a certain sort of melancholy feeling. Memories of Christmases past, memories of my three kids opening presents on Christmas morning, memories of holiday baking and holiday concerts. I asked my wife for a divorce after Thanksgiving back in 2015, I knew things would get really difficult during the holiday season. Since my wife had been fired from her fifth job in 10 years, and we had little to no money, so that year Christmas was quite threadbare and draining.

I used to ask myself the question, “Should I have stayed in the marriage?” And now, 10 years later, I have a definitive answer to that. “Hell No.” When my wife and I were first married, things were great. We truly were a happy couple and we enjoyed raising our kids. But when my wife’s personality began to change, due to her drug use, things became quite hard. I would try and talk to her about it, but she wouldn’t listen. And then when she started losing jobs, and our income was cut in half at times, the stress of it all sometimes was almost unbearable.

I remember one Christmas (when she was unemployed) and my daughter was still little and believed in Santa, my colleagues at my school gave me $200 in cash to buy her Santa presents. I can still remember them coming into my classroom with happy looks on their faces. I brought the money home and showed it to my wife. I thought she would be joyful, but she wasn’t. But she did use the money to buy presents, but they were odd ones. In hindsight I should have just gone out and bought them myself, but I was working and she wasn’t. She would go to garage sales and find old used toys. One toy in particular was an old doll with ratty tangled hair and one eye that wouldn’t open. On Christmas Eve, late into the evening (or should I say early Christmas morning), she was trying to fix it up to make it presentable. I will never forget her dumping olive oil on the scalp and trying to use the oil to comb out the tangles. I have a distinct memory of my son looking at me with a “WTF” look on his face. On Christmas morning when my daughter opened the gift, it reeked of stale olive oil. Needless to say, my daughter never played with that doll.

My wife liked to decorate for Christmas and would go all out for it. I would oblige her, knowing that I’d be the one to take everything down. She was great at putting all of the “fa la la” stuff up, but not good at taking it down. I remember one Christmas she wanted to put an artificial tree up in our entry hall, so we did. Then New Year’s Day came. Then it was mid-January. Then Valentine’s ads were coming up in February and the tree was still in the foyer. So one day, when she wasn’t home, I got my son to help me take it down and store it in the attic. We did it very carefully knowing that she’d be critical of what we’d done. When she got home, she threw a fit. I thought I was just helping to clean up and move on towards spring. She marched up to the attic, took the tree back out, and started complaining bitterly how we didn’t put the tree back in the box correctly. She then repacked it muttering to herself the whole time.

In the last five years of our marriage, our friends would ask me if things were all right. I would question them as to why they would ask that, and they’d tell me that she was turning into someone that they didn’t know. They commented on how she would ridicule me in front of others, and how her personality had changed. I would shrug it off, but inside I was slowly shriveling up. I am not a combative person by nature, so I would just take it. Maybe if I would have started yelling back, she would have become more aware of what she was doing. I guess I’ll never know.

A blogger sent me this poem by Mary Oliver back in 2017 which helped me to realize that I had to move on. It is called “The Journey.” I have come to really appreciate my blogger friends throughout the years. I went back and looked at an old post of mine from almost 10 years ago as I wanted to read what I had written when I started getting back into writing again.

The Journey

One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice—
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
“Mend my life!”
each voice cried.
But you didn’t stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
though their melancholy
was terrible.
It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do—
determined to save
the only life you could save.

I have read this poem over and over, especially when things got tough. I will never ever forget when I first read this poem, and I will be forever grateful to the blogger who shared it with me. Thank you Spo.

If you have read this post to the end, thank you for allowing me to reminisce about some things that perhaps aren’t always so good to remember. I will close with a photo of Miss Shirley after she has snacked on some fresh snow. The lighting was bad as it was getting dark. Shirley would stay out all day if I would let her!

Peace,

Michael