Miss You Much

This is the time of year…. beyond any other… that I soooooooooooooooooooo miss my departed loved ones. Most especially, I miss my mother = Delores Marie NICHOLSON (1929-2005).

It is a truism to say that we have only ONE mother…. who occupies a unique and precious place in our hearts that no other person… in the world, ever… can fill.

Here you see her, looking pensive as she languishes in the glow of the “merry” Christmas tree on the sun porch of our family homestead on the Southside of Chicago. The baby doll whose face she covers was undoubtedly mine. The gifts too… as my sister had not yet been born.

What was she thinking? Could it have been contemplation of her own Christmases past? The music on the stereo (which was, surely, “Merry Christmas Baby” by Charles Brown — a rendition he played relentlessly from the day after Thanksgiving to the day after New Year’s)? The huge mistake she made in marrying him?

I can only imagine. I shall never know.

THIS is the way I will remember my mama … on Christmas Eve the year before she passed on…. Knowing that FOR ME, her indominitable spirit will ALWAYS be alive!