We spent Christmas with my Parents in Eastern Washington. It was good and I am so glad we did. My Father will be 88 on New Years Day. He is very old and frail now...he has very little memory. He has dementia and has gone way down hill the last month or so. There are many times he will look at me, with my Husband sitting by my side, and ask me if I have a boyfriend. I tell him "Yes!" "In fact I married him and here he is...and we have two children who are your Grandsons!". He gets a big smile on his face and says "oh...that's good."
My Father was a beautiful writer. He was a newspaper man. Worked for a small town newspaper and wrote wonderful stories...mostly about his life during a simpler time. I had been given the copies of the articles he had written and had intentions of putting them together for my siblings some day. We moved and I had put extra special care into packing them. The problem was I couldn't remember where. The other day I told my Sister that I couldn't find them. It took a lot of guts to tell her that. She wasn't very happy with me and neither was I. I went to bed that night feeling so restless about it. But here's the crazy part...I had a dream about where I put them that night. I looked where my dream told me to look and there they were! Talk about an answer to prayer!!!
My Sister had talked to a woman who works with the council on aging. She had told my Sister how good it would be for Dad to see the articles he wrote again. So, with articles in hand I brought them to him for Christmas. He didn't remember that he had ever written for a news paper. But after he started reading the articles he started remembering the things he wrote about.
Finding those articles was like finding a pot of gold. I can't tell you what it meant to me to see my Dad have a little glimmer of the times he had written about come back to him. I was so thankful. On our way home we took the ferry back to the island and were greeted with a rainbow shining on the tip of the island. I was reminded of the pot of gold...I will cherish this Christmas...most likely the last I will have with my Dad but one I will always treasure.
