Legacy Writing 365:95

By our first Christmas in Houston, my mother had moved to Salt Lake City. She flew down to spend the holidays with us, and when she was going through airport security–long before our post-9/11 world–she was told she’d have to take a photo with her Kodak Instant camera to prove it was really a camera and not some sort of explosive device. She told me that she refused to waste a photo and had someone–whether an airline employee or whoever drove her to the airport–shoot the picture of her.

I found this one and other pictures from that Christmas among her things. I’m not sure I have any photos of that Christmas, but I remember it quite well. While she was visiting, we had a severe freeze, causing pipes to burst in our apartment complex. This meant we spent a lot of time at Lynne’s, and Pete, not thrilled with time alone, turned into a Very Bad Dog.

Or maybe he was just mad because he had to wear a sweater. In any case, we came home one evening to find that he’d pulled a collectible record from all the vinyl he could have chosen and chewed it into dozens of pieces, along with the picture sleeve it was in. He also pulled an ornament from the tree that had been on Tom’s very first birthday cake (remember, Tom was born on Christmas Day). It was a little chewed but salvageable. Why do dogs always go for the things that have real or sentimental value when they decide to act up?

We tried to tough it out at our place, but ultimately, we spent nights at Lynne’s when repairs couldn’t be made in a timely fashion. (Pete went with us.) There was only one guest room with a double bed, and Mother insisted that Tom and I take it and she would take the couch. Martyr! But it was so unusually cold that we kept a fire going almost constantly in the living room, where she was sleeping. She coughed and hacked and swore we were trying to kill her with the wood smoke. Couldn’t have had anything to do with the number of cigarettes she smoked, I’m sure.

Despite all the mishaps, I still remember it as a good Christmas and was happy to find her photos from that year.

Lynne and Jess at our apartment; the couch Mother slept on was much larger than this love seat, I promise. I’m totally digging Lynne’s acid washed jeans.

I might add that the lessons we learned from that Christmas served us well when we rode out Hurricane Rita at Green Acres many years later. That time, we made Mother take the guest room. Lynne and Craig set up a portable bed with an air mattress in their dining room for Tom and me, and Tim used Jess’s room because Jess had married and moved out by then.