December 24 arrived quietly.<\/p>\n
There was no special announcement to tell me that the day I had been thinking about for weeks had finally come.<\/p>\n
The calendar had said it was coming.<\/p>\n
Now it was here.<\/p>\n
I went about the morning as I usually did, taking care of the small things that needed doing and trying not to let my thoughts run too far ahead.<\/p>\n
It wasn't easy.<\/p>\n
The date had become tied to Wendell in my mind.<\/p>\n
Every time I remembered the yellow paper, I felt that familiar mixture of hope and uncertainty.<\/p>\n
For my Winnie.<\/p>\n
Three simple words.<\/p>\n
I had wondered what they meant when I first saw them.<\/p>\n
I was still wondering.<\/p>\n
But I didn't want to spend the whole day standing inside my own imagination, building a version of Christmas Eve that might have nothing to do with the one Wendell had planned.<\/p>\n
I wanted to let the day unfold.<\/p>\n
That was harder than it sounded.<\/p>\n
I had learned to prepare myself for disappointment long before I met Wendell.<\/p>\n
After Dwight died, I often tried to keep my expectations small.<\/p>\n
If I expected little, I told myself, then I could not be hurt as badly when life failed to give me what I wanted.<\/p>\n
It was a reasonable idea.<\/p>\n
It was also a lonely way to live.<\/p>\n
I didn't want to bring that habit into every new part of my life.<\/p>\n
Wendell had given me reasons to hope.<\/p>\n
He had been patient with my memories.<\/p>\n
He had listened when I talked about things that mattered to me.<\/p>\n
He had never treated my grief as a burden I should hurry to put down.<\/p>\n
Those things were real.<\/p>\n
So were my questions.<\/p>\n
I didn't need to deny one truth to make room for the other.<\/p>\n
I could look forward to seeing him without deciding that everything between us was already settled.<\/p>\n
I could be nervous without assuming something was wrong.<\/p>\n
I could hope for a good day without demanding that it answer every question I had ever asked myself.<\/p>\n
That was how I wanted to approach Christmas Eve.<\/p>\n
I thought about the garage again.<\/p>\n
The photographs had been there before I noticed them.<\/p>\n
The yellow paper had been fixed to the wall with blue painter's tape.<\/p>\n
The date had been written beneath the words.<\/p>\n
The buttercup-yellow paint had stood out against the ordinary colors of the garage.<\/p>\n
And Wendell had appeared at the top of the ramp with a pencil behind his ear and sawdust on his old blue shirt.<\/p>\n
I could still remember how quickly his face changed.<\/p>\n
\u201cOh, honey.\u201d<\/p>\n
He had sounded frightened.<\/p>\n
Or embarrassed.<\/p>\n
Or perhaps he had simply been caught unprepared.<\/p>\n
I had tried to understand his expression so many times that I no longer trusted my own guesses.<\/p>\n
Only Wendell knew what he had been feeling.<\/p>\n
Only Wendell could explain what he had been preparing.<\/p>\n
I wanted to give him the chance to do that.<\/p>\n
But I also wanted to be honest about what the waiting had done to me.<\/p>\n
I had spent too many days wondering whether I was welcome in his life.<\/p>\n
I didn't need a perfect answer.<\/p>\n
I needed a truthful one.<\/p>\n
That distinction mattered.<\/p>\n
A perfect answer might have sounded beautiful and still left me uncertain.<\/p>\n
A truthful answer might have been difficult to hear, but at least it would give us something real to work with.<\/p>\n
I had lived long enough to know that the truth did not always arrive wrapped in comfort.<\/p>\n
Sometimes it arrived in ordinary words spoken by someone who was finally ready to stop hiding behind silence.<\/p>\n
I hoped Wendell would speak those words.<\/p>\n
I also knew I couldn't make him ready.<\/p>\n
All I could do was decide what I was willing to offer when the moment came.<\/p>\n
I would offer him my attention.<\/p>\n
I would listen.<\/p>\n
I would ask questions if I needed to.<\/p>\n
And I would not pretend to understand something that still confused me.<\/p>\n
That last part was important.<\/p>\n
I had often smiled through uncertainty because I wanted to keep a peaceful moment from becoming uncomfortable.<\/p>\n
But peace built on things left unsaid never lasted very long.<\/p>\n
I didn't want that kind of peace anymore.<\/p>\n
I wanted the kind that came after two people had been honest with each other.<\/p>\n
I wanted to feel that we were standing on the same side of the conversation.<\/p>\n
Not one person explaining and the other trying to guess what remained hidden.<\/p>\n
Not one person deciding what the other was ready to know.<\/p>\n
Just two people trying to understand one another.<\/p>\n
Perhaps that was too much to expect from a single evening.<\/p>\n
I didn't think it was too much to hope for.<\/p>\n
As the day moved forward, I found myself remembering Christmases from earlier years.<\/p>\n
Dwight had been part of so many of them.<\/p>\n
His presence belonged to my memories whether I wanted to think about him or not.<\/p>\n
There were things I would always miss.<\/p>\n
I could not change that.<\/p>\n
Nor did I want to erase those years simply because my life had changed.<\/p>\n
Dwight had been my husband.<\/p>\n
That would always be true.<\/p>\n
Wendell was a different person, with a different life and a different place in my heart.<\/p>\n
I didn't need to compare them.<\/p>\n
I didn't need to make one smaller to make room for the other.<\/p>\n
I had finally begun to understand that loving again was not a betrayal.<\/p>\n
It was simply another part of being alive.<\/p>\n
That thought helped me breathe a little easier.<\/p>\n
I didn't know what Wendell had planned for the evening.<\/p>\n
I didn't know whether the yellow paper would finally make sense to me.<\/p>\n
I didn't even know whether I would understand everything immediately if he explained it.<\/p>\n
But I was ready to stop guessing.<\/p>\n
I wanted to meet him as he was.<\/p>\n
I wanted him to meet me as I was, too.<\/p>\n
Not as a woman who never worried.<\/p>\n
Not as someone who could accept every silence without being affected by it.<\/p>\n
Just me.<\/p>\n
A woman who had loved her husband, lost him, and found herself willing to love another man.<\/p>\n
A woman who was grateful for kindness but still needed honesty.<\/p>\n
A woman who had learned that patience could be generous without becoming endless.<\/p>\n
When I thought about the words on the yellow paper, I tried to hear them without adding anything to them.<\/p>\n
For my Winnie.<\/p>\n
They were affectionate words.<\/p>\n
They were personal words.<\/p>\n
They had been written for a reason I still did not fully understand.<\/p>\n
I could let them matter without deciding what they promised.<\/p>\n
That was enough for the moment.<\/p>\n
I didn't want to turn Christmas Eve into a test Wendell didn't know he was taking.<\/p>\n
I wanted to give us both a chance to speak plainly.<\/p>\n
If he had something important to share, I would listen.<\/p>\n
If I had questions, I would ask them.<\/p>\n
And if we discovered that we had misunderstood each other, I hoped we would be willing to admit it.<\/p>\n
That was the kind of beginning I wanted.<\/p>\n
Not a flawless evening.<\/p>\n
An honest one.<\/p>\n
By then, I had stopped expecting the day to arrive with all my worries already settled.<\/p>\n
The worries were there.<\/p>\n
So was my hope.<\/p>\n
I could carry both.<\/p>\n
And when I thought of the buttercup-yellow paint, I no longer tried to decide what it meant.<\/p>\n
I let it remain what I had actually seen: a bright color in a garage, beside a ramp and photographs, beneath three words that had made me wonder.<\/p>\n
The explanation belonged to Wendell.<\/p>\n
I was ready to hear it.<\/p>\n
December 24 arrived quietly. There was no special announcement to tell me that the day I had been thinking about for weeks had finally come. The calendar had said it … <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":17888,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17905","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-feel-every-story"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/feeleverystory.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17905","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/feeleverystory.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/feeleverystory.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/feeleverystory.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/feeleverystory.online\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=17905"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/feeleverystory.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17905\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17925,"href":"https:\/\/feeleverystory.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17905\/revisions\/17925"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/feeleverystory.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/17888"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/feeleverystory.online\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=17905"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/feeleverystory.online\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=17905"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/feeleverystory.online\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=17905"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}