An Unexpected Message on Christmas Day

The week before Christmas was quite busy for Val Thevictorian. She had the entire stockpile of presents to wrap, and dishes to prepare, and people to see.

One afternoon was spent having lunch with her favorite gambling aunt, where Val learned that her cousin is quite happy with her mom’s house that he had purchased from Val and her sister the ex-mayor’s wife. Val told Auntie to let Cousin know that Thevictorian family would be out to the house at 1:00 on Christmas Day for dinner. A habit, you know, Val having been there every year since Li’l Val had moved into that home the summer before seventh grade. She was joking, of course.

Val also spent a morning with her best ol’ ex-teaching buddy Mabel. They breakfasted in their usual reserved room apart from the masses at Hardee’s, with Genius as a guest for the first hour. One item Val learned from Mabel was that Mabel had been battling ladybugs in her new home, and her son in his new home next door as well. The vacuum was their tool of disposal, just as my mom had used.

Now here’s a funny thing. I had not seen a ladybug since the dried-out dead ones on the tile floor of Mom’s bathroom when Sis and I cleaned out her house this past summer, and then that live ladybug in a baby’s nose during the last five minutes of parent conference night in October. Yet Mabel and family 25 miles away from Backroads were currently inundated with them. Nature is so whimsical.

I was exhausted by Christmas Day. All the visiting, the wrapping, the cooking, out late Christmas Eve at Sis’s house for snacks and game-playing. Sis had asked us to come over sometime during the afternoon on Christmas Day, to exchange gifts, just her family and mine. Sis always has her grown kids come for breakfast, and to open their gifts. Then Sis and the ex-mayor head to his family's house for supper. So they had an opening in their schedule. Thevictorians piled into the new Acadia and hit the road after spending 10 minutes eating Val's Christmas dinner. It’s not far to Sis's house. We got there around 1:15.

We pulled up Sis’s driveway and parked by the garage. I saw that she had the garage door up so we could enter through the kitchen door, rather than walk around to the front of the house like real company. We started in, The Pony in the lead.

“Look, Mom. A ladybug.”

A single ladybug. Right there behind the ex-mayor’s car, as my family traipsed through the garage to spend Christmas Day with Sis’s family instead of our previously usual Christmas Day at Mom’s house.

Funny thing, nature.