She’s been hanging in my kitchen window for just a couple of weeks, and I don’t want to take her down. But I know the time will come, so I soak her up every time I stand at the sink to wash dishes or pare potatoes. She’s a gingerbread woman, a blown-glass Christmas ornament I found at a 99 cent store last year and brought home to hang in the center of a spare, spruce and holy berry fake wreath I bought there the year before. And she means something, though I’ve been taking my time discovering what.
She’s iridescent gold with pink
crabapple cheeks and an infectious smile, a red ribbon bow at her white collar
on the gold dress edged in sugary white, with a green apron tied around her
wide middle and a pair of cranberry red boots that might have come from the
army but for their scrumptious color.
Between her chubby hands is a string of gingerbread men cookies, an
offering that appears to have pleased her as much in the making of them as they
hopefully will please the recipients.
Her hair is as white as mine and looks like it’s still up in
rollers. I love this woman.
I think she’s my alter ego, the
woman I might have liked to have been if things had been different. I think in some ways she’s a keeper of the
hope, if not the promise, that things might yet still be that way. She’s the Christmas maker, and I think she
stands for the bravery of women everywhere who dedicate themselves to the arts
of Home making at this time of year.
I am slow to arrive at the task of
Christmas making, and even slower to finish it, reluctant to let go once I have
my hands on that plow. But the Twelve
Days of Christmas start on Christmas
Day, not end: they end on January 5th,
the day this issue will hit the stands, something I learned from my dear friend
Wendy in Oregon. In that lovely song,
people are still giving gifts through the January New Year doldrums, so I feel
quite justified in leaving my red and green decorations in place for yet
another week or so.
“It’s not going to be a good New
Year,” my beautiful friend Nancy told me in the parking lot of R-N Market as I
strode toward her to clock in New Year’s Day.
“Why?” I asked, stopping to listen.
“That woman who was killed yesterday morning, Friday, she was my
daughter’s mother-in-law,” she answered, trying not to cry. “She was always so full of life. . . .” She told me what she knew about the
circumstances of the accident, then we hugged and she left with her trunk full
of groceries.
Later, manning register #1 as the
afternoon turned to evening on that first day of 2011, I got another glimpse of
the impact of this tragedy. One of the
woman’s sons came in with friends and identified himself that way to me, even
though I am a total stranger to him.
“She used to come in here all the time,” he mentioned, and I wondered
how I would ever be able to identify her in my mind. He left with two friends and three 30-can
packs of Bud, and I called after him to drink carefully. “I won’t be touching this,” he said softly.
“What was her name?” the other
checkers asked, and all I could remember was that it was Hispanic and her last
name started with an “h”. At the market,
sometimes we know people by face and personality a long time before we learn
their names unless they normally pay by check.
Those who pay cash often remain nameless even if the connection between
us borders on intimate.
Inglatina Huerta is the name of the
woman who was killed early last Friday on her way to work at 6 a.m. in the
dark. Nancy said she’d gotten the frost
off her windshield on the outside, but that the car was fogging up on the
inside or something that made it hard to see.
Nancy said she was killed instantly when the car or truck plowed into
her head-on, driven by one of Vahn Blue’s sons, Layton. Despite the fact that the greatest degree of
pain is felt through the families of the victim in these situations, I know
that the Blue family must also be suffering.
I extend my sympathy in both directions, knowing neither family well
enough to say it in person.
After work, I went home and started
cleaning up the kitchen, trying to make some peace in the middle of the chaos
in my heart and mind. I found myself
staring at the gingerbread woman, still smiling, still offering her cookies and
hope. Still trying to make Christmas
last even though the ball has dropped in Times Square and bare, dying fir trees
are already lying on their sides in the alleys around town. What is the hope that drives us, particularly
us women, to add the work of making Christmas to our already full lives? What hope is it that we anticipate
breathlessly on Christmas Eve, anticipating that the next morning we will find
ourselves transformed?
“It’s just love,” she said, echoing
something a man once told me about why he got up at 5 every morning to squeeze
fresh orange juice for his two boys.
Just love. And I imagine it was
just love that got Inglatina Huerta up in the wee hours to drive to work on New
Year’s Eve day, as she probably has been doing much of her life. And it is just love that is causing the pain
in those families and friends who now have to learn to live without her.
“Grief is the price we pay for
love,” Diana Lampen, a Quaker, wrote in 1996, and every time I remember that
tremendous paradox, I am comforted. It
is the price we pay for being loved as well as the cost of loving others,
because at some point in time all of our lights will go out and the loving
we’ve offered and received will pass into memory, become passive rather than
active vocabulary.
And some of it may be passed on in
strange, invisible ways. In recipes for
cookies and cranberry sauce, tamales and posole. In wooden toys crafted in Dad’s shop, in
doll’s dresses sown late at night on Mom’s Singer. In saved letters and notes from boxes that
arrived in the mail saying “Nothing special – just wanted you to know I’m
thinking about you.”
Just love. That’s what the gingerbread woman is all
about. I’m glad she told me.
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Trudy
Wischemann is a remedial gingerbread woman who is grateful to be told people’s
stories. You can send her your thoughts
on grief and/or gingerbread c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.
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