Mimi Writes.......: Monday Mimisms ~ Like He Just Walked Through The Door

Papa's box 1974

Somewhere in the attic is a box....and another....and another......that looks like this one. Every year of my life until the year that he died, on Valentine's Day, he brought one home with him - one for her and one for me.

It was the same every year.

Wonderfully the same.

A red medium sized heart-shaped box of chocolates
with a red silk rose and a ribbon.

From Papa

It wasn't the chocolate I craved. Nor the box.
It was this....

As if on cue, he would enter with an eager smile and a faithful gift for both of us on February 14th. He would kiss my grandmother on the cheek as she hugged his laughing belly, cup my uplifted adoring face with the other hand and ask, "How's my girl?"

What a silly question.

He knew I was his girl.

I still am.

Today I asked my own sweet three-year-old granddaughter the same question:

"How's my girl?"

Her answer was a big sloppy kiss on the side of my cheek, and then the other, as if she knew I needed affection that only she could deliver, with an extra smack of "wipstick" smeared from one end of her face to the other now transferred to mine, she laughingly commanded, "Go look in the mirror, Mimi!" And there it was. Two big love lips on both sides of my face, purposely planted by none other than "my girl."

It was the faithfulness of those boxes that made me love him so.

It's the memory of that faithfulness that teaches me how to love my own.

It's why I make sure she has heart-shaped boxes on Valentine's Day. She will have seasons in her life - as I have had recently - when there is no tangible presence of sentimental gifts, times she'll feel alone. I hope she keeps the boxes. This one from Papa has a reflecting surface in the middle. I can see my own face clearly in the box year after year. For the past forty years, no matter the season I'm in, when I pick up the box I not only see myself..... I see and feel how he loves me

Still

And it feels like he just walked through the door