We finally took our Christmas tree down.

Dan was here.

When I first started this entry, it began with the admission that the tree was still up, that it might stay up through March or even later because I was passed the point of feeling bad or even embarrassed about it.

I am working hard to figure out what truly deserves priority in life right now, and as a pretty plastic tree loitering in the living room hardly seems threatening, packing it away slid down the list.

The only reason the job crept back up---and eventually got done---is because I wanted to make room for some of the toys Sav and Eva received for Christmas.

The girls are up there on the priority list.

So too is not breaking an ankle on the wood handle of a motherfucking toy duck lying in the middle of the room.

So we finally undecorated. 

With the tree down and their sheets clean, the house was ready for Katie, Gary and the kiddos, who just spent 10 days up at Bec’s house in NH, to return.

Return home.  At first I wrote that the house was ready for them to return home.

It’s how I feel but I was shy to write it…to impose it on them.

Home is a concept that every one of us living in this house is uncertain of right now.  Sometimes I say to Dan, “I want to go home,” and he knows I’m talking about the Exeter, NH apartment where we lived for the last seven years---the first seven years of our marriage, the final seven of my 12 years in NH.  He knows when I say it that I am longing for the protection and safety of the smallness of our life there.   It was sanctuary and cave.  Home is where you hide?

But of course I am home now in RI.  I don’t mean that this where we live.  Although true, I don’t entirely feel that we actually live here yet.  But I am back in the town where I grew up.  In the very house.  I am home in that way.  In that “you can never go home again” way. 

Though, especially with Katie here, it does sometimes feel like we both somehow did go home again.  Like when we let each other know when one of us is going to shower so that neither of us suffers the cold water that results when both the upstairs and downstairs showers are in use. We’re more polite about it now, but as kids we employed a similar system known as,  “I call first shower!”  (As the youngest of my sisters, it would have only ever been with Katie, arguably the most benevolent of my four overlords, that I would have ever even tried calling first shower with any expectation of it being honored.) 

If home is where you heart is, I’m there.  Though there have been times when Dan’s three days a week working in NH (the other days he works from here…from home) had me feeling like my home is doing so much driving---and both of us are so tired---that we can’t settle in to each other the way we used to.  Fortunately, we’ve found our way home to each other more lately.

And of course, if home is where your mom is, I’m as there as I’ll ever again get to be.  This feels especially so when I’m sitting at her spot at the kitchen table or outside among her flowers where she planted her seeds and hands and self into the earth. This is a far more positive outlook than what “home is where your mom is” used to evoke in me, which was a heavy acceptance that I’d never again be home.  

I’ll also add that having released my dad’s ashes into the river here, a sense of him--- steady as the current that I imagine lapping him gently back to our shore each day---contributes to an earthly, almost tribal sense of home at this spot on the northwestern bank of the Sakonnet River.  Though, as far as I know, there is no proverb that says, Home Is Where Your Release Your Dad’s Biodegradable Ash Package.  (But if my dad were here, he’d put that on a sign for me to hang in the kitchen.)

When we all got back to the house after spending almost a week in Boston during Katie’s surgery and recovery, Gary said it felt good to be home and then asked if I minded him saying that.  I didn’t.  I’m glad that’s how it feels.  It, being the house, I thought then. 

But then Katie called me from NH when Sav, who was having a great time up there, announced out of the blue that she was feeling homesick.  Katie said she asked Sav what she was feeling, wondering if she’d mention Ohio or her bedroom here in RI.  Wondering what “homesick” means to a four-year-old who has lived quite a few places in her short life with all the travel they’ve had to do during my parents’ illnesses and now her mom’s.

“I miss Lola and Dan,” she told Katie.

We were homesick for them too.

(Though, let’s be real, the break was nice. I’m sure Katie and Gary would say the same.)

 I woke up the morning they were to return so excited to see them.  I wanted Sav to come up to my room and sit on my bed and pepper me with questions until she stumped me.  Why can’t little girls be mommies yet?  Why are you an auntie and not a mommy?  Why does mommy have cancer in her belly? 

I wanted to see Eva shaking her little diapered butt to the Super Why theme song in the morning and (dare I say good morning to her) to then point her finger at me and say “NO!”  (I look forward to Eva being old enough for a morning cup of coffee.) 

I missed them.  I loved the break and needed it to recover, but I missed them.

As we put the Christmas decorations away, Dan pushed the little red button on the foot and a half tall singing Bing Crosby doll that we bought years ago and said,“It’s his last song of the season.”

I remembered how when we brought it out at the beginning of December, Sav and Eva kept pushing the button until they’d hear the horns start for Bing’s “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town” and then dance around him until the song stopped and it was time to push the button again.  Then they wanted us to play more Christmas music and Sav said to Dan, “Will you dance with me like we’re married?”  As Katie and Gary caught a rare moment alone in another room, we played one of Eva’s favorites songs, a song Katie sings to her at bedtime.  And with her little head on my shoulder and Sav’s on Dan’s, the four of us slow danced in the living room by light of the tree to Silent Night.

I had almost forgotten that night.  I had almost forgotten that the holidays had even happened.  The weeks leading up to Katie’s surgery on January 3 were a terrifying blur of trips to the ER, Katie losing her ability to walk, fighting for appointments, and the growing possibility that she might not make it to surgery.  Then once it was a go, it was a blur of last-minute scans, blood tests and arranging.  Then it was surgery and lack of pain control during recovery.  Eventually she was walking again and then finally discharged.

As is my style, I waited until the worst of it was over---Katie was through surgery--- and promptly got so sick that I bruised, possibly fractured, my ribs from over two weeks of hard, unrelenting coughing.  The cough and rib pain (the latter of which is still with me) coupled with the mess of a post-holidays house had me wondering why we’d even bothered to decorate this year.  (It’s true that I hate holiday clean-up and have this thought every year, but this year it was especially bad.)  And then Dan pushed Bing’s button and I remembered not just that night of dancing with the girls, but all the other sweet moments and gifts that came with having these guys here over the holidays.  Dan had as much fun hiding that Elf on the Shelf as Savvy did finding it.  (That little guy hung from ceilings, stared down at Sav from atop the toilet paper roll and at one point found himself trapped inside a lidded glass jar, though only the adults knew that the little sign taped to his hands said, “HELP!”)  And there were so many “Why is Eva quiet?” panics that ended with us finding her playing with the straw dolls and little ceramic carolers I’d set up in a wintry scene beneath the tree.  While I did discover quite a few headless townspeople---“Something happened in that village,” Dan said, his voice faking a quiver---finding Eva playing there was particularly gratifying.

When I’d first put up the tree, Katie had told me that one of her clearest and favorite holiday memories from childhood was playing with the scene my mom put up each year beneath the tree.  She told me how she remembered playing with those straw dolls---some of the same ones I’d just positioned to be sledding or crossing the bridge over the frozen pond---and having an awareness of her own happiness, a sense of the warmth of the house and our family inside it…a sense of home.

That's when I told Gary, after he’d expressed some concern, not to worry about Eva breaking anything.

"It's meant to be played with," I said.

I always wonder how Sav and Eva will remember this time.  What images and emotions will be etched on their brains to be pieced together later.  I am hopeful that if not the dancing or playing by the light of the tree, that there might be some memory of a sense of home.  A home---if not the house, then to Dan’s and my heart---where they will  know they can always return.

And should they forget, perhaps I’ll show them the decapitated villagers to trigger their happy memories…

Or make a sign for their kitchen: Home is where they’re headless.