home for the holidays

Catster says this cat is cooler than mine

Christmas is coming early this year. For me, anyway. I’ll be good and open my presents when I’m supposed to, but I won’t have to be patient much longer. Two short flights and one night in Amsterdam. One more flight (a long one), two hours or less in a car, and I’ll be home. I call it home, but it was never my home. I didn’t grow up in that house. My parents moved south when I moved west. I took most of what I owned with me, but it ended up back with them, in the basement where I slept that one year between the Great Plains and Greece, and where I sleep now, as a guest. I see my books, my bed, my cactus, and my cat once a year. At Christmas.

The books are in boxes, stacked sky high; the cactus is just as tall, immovable now, having reached the ceiling of the sun porch and started growing across it, and into it. As for the cat, she is no longer mine. She remembers me, but I sit alone and jealous while she snuggles up with my mom, or more often, my dad. She visits my mother in bed at night, meows, brings toys; mom puts them under the pillow, half-asleep, and wakes up to a funny collection in the morning. They have an understanding, those two, and a sense of humor.

My bed is in pieces -- parts of a life I sometimes think about going back to.

It’s a comfort to have somewhere to go, even if it’s only for two weeks of the year, sometimes three. When I go home, I always have the sense of going home. The strange part is that I feel it equally strongly, when I come back.

Merry Christmas to everyone. Especially you, Steph.