Just a Christmas Card

A little musing I had a couple of days ago. Because some things just set you off thinking, don’t they?

Just a Christmas card.

Came through the door today as it normally does around this time of year.

Hand delivered.

Letterbox sounds so fierce sometimes.

A real ‘SNAP’ - as though a guard dog actively warning people away from the house.

I admit, I kinda like that, though.

.

I already knew.

Found out a couple of days ago.

Wasn’t like it came as a great surprise or anything.

He’d been ill for some time. Late eighties.

Had to happen sometime, right?

Right.

But somehow, seeing it there on the card - or rather not seeing it - made it feel more real, palpable.

.

Her name only has three letters.

I mean, it has more, but she abbreviates it.

‘Val’.

Straight to the point, no nonsense.

Rather like her.

Can’t ever imagine her as a ‘Valerie’.

Not a flowery woman by a long chalk.

Proper Hannah Hauxwell type - out in her field in all weathers, every day of the year. Lives for her animals - and boy, she’s plenty of them! Dogs, horses, cats, chickens, pigs…..yeah.

Lives for her animals and…..

Him.

Did.

I guess there’s one less reason now, hey?

.

David.

‘Val and David’

That’s what the card said, every Christmas,  year after year since I moved in, in 2005.

But this year, it didn’t.

Never would again.

‘Val’

It simply said.

Whispering yet screaming.

Just ‘Val’, now.

I’d never seen a word look lonely before.

So small, inky and vulnerable. The backdrop of plain white card consuming the rest of the page like a snow drift.

Red.

Wonder if she’d purposely written it in red, it being a festive colour?

.

Doesn’t seem two minutes since I was knocking on their door, just two houses down, presenting my baby son. Seemed the right time to do it, whilst delivering the Christmas cards.

How I’d felt such a good, proud, functioning mammal. The way a mama cat appears on a doorstep, young in tow, to a human it trusts. Like Elsa the lioness at the end of ‘Born Free’.

There I’d stood in the early winter cold, 12 years ago, him in a padded snow suit - more pointless wadding than an Amazon package. Sky blue with a navy pattern. Needlecord. Or was it brushed cotton? Brushed needle cord, maybe? Those first outfits that cushion our offspring like bulky, fabric dodgem cars! His teeny fingers wiggling like points of a fragrant peach star, trying to grasp his first snowflake.

The cat had been at my side that December - mischievous little thing, just like ‘Felix’ from the advert. How he used to follow me everywhere back then…….weaving his wiry black and white form between my legs as if to remind me,

“Hey, I’M your first born!”

Soft fairy lights had been strewn - as they always were at Christmas time - over the tall, spiky Monkey Puzzle that dominated the driveway.

“Monkey Puzzle trees grow really quickly when they’re young and then……..all of a sudden, they just stall.”

My mum, a keen gardener, had once told me.

I’d seen it for myself; those imposing dark green branches spiralling upwards like corkscrews insistent on popping open a champagne heaven.

But we all have to stop somewhere, don’t we?

Even trees.

.

There they’d stood at the door, the two of them.

Together.

Val and David.

Our neighbours.

A Nursery Rhyme couple, all pink and patches. White hair, rickety spectacles, rosy cheeks and khaki green wellies. Yorkshire accents thicker than fresh manure.

“I’ve brought your new neighbour to meet you!”

I’d said, shyly, lifting my gaze from my days old son, peering out nervously from beneath my hair, like a young Princess Di.

How the elderly adore an infant! As if them getting older somehow renders them that bit more of a treasure; their newness that bit further away, unattainable and milkishly perfect.

And now, years later there he was in my living room; no longer helpless but a robust 12 year old. All booming voice, lithe limbs and limitless energy.

Here I was, no longer a thirty-something naive new mother but pushing fifty.

Silas, our cat - that beautiful, green eyed loving companion, had been taken by kidney failure a few years earlier.

And in her cottage, in her eighties, there she was too.

Val.

Suddenly alone without her one gem stone man she’d carved out a life with.

.

There had been cars.

Lots of cars, parked outside the house over the last few days…….and now none.

“It’s good her family are here, supporting her”

I’d said.

But at some point the cars have to leave.

Back they all go to their own houses, their own Christmases.

And that’s life, isn’t it?

Some of us are lucky enough to have our names beside others on Christmas cards for a long, long time.

But one day, it’s time to write our name alone.

A little awkward.

But like a fawn, something makes us find our feet, carry on.

I pick up the card again. My eyes drawn once again to her name, alone on the page yet at the same time, utterly filling it.

What do you write back in these circumstances?

To invite the recently bereaved to have a ‘Happy’ or ‘Merry’ Christmas, somehow seems insincere, crass, wrong.

I find my pen wobbling.

I’m apprehensive. If I add our names, does it look as though I’m bragging? Rubbing it in?

“Hey! Look at me! I live with OTHER PEOPLE! I’M NOT ALONE at Christmas!”

It would seem to yell.

‘Thinking of you. Have a peaceful Christmas’

I write hesitantly, and beneath it, I form a single kiss.

‘Peaceful’.

It’s never going to be right.

There are some things you can’t make right.

It’s an exercise in harm minimisation, really, I conclude.

Peaceful. Yeah, I’ll go with peaceful.