Christmas Lights On a Snowy December Eve

Our apartment looks out on the parking lot of Montefiore– that transient place old people go in their final days. Visitors come and go all hours of the day and night to be with their loved ones– those they fear may not last another night. Tonight it is unusually quiet at Montefiore, at two o’clock AM, on this eighteenth day of December, just one week before Christmas. I watch the snowflakes helplessly fall in the dim yellow light of the parking lot lamp posts. They glide and swirl in unpredictable circles, like tiny off balance ballet dancers. With delight, my eyes catch sight of a single string of colorful twinkling Christmas lights in a resident’s second floor window. My mind races back to a similarly cold December eve, more than fifty years ago, when I hung a single string of Christmas lights around the inside of my grandmother’s bedroom window. How she loved looking at the lights, and watching snowflakes dance outside her window, while I held her soft warm hand, and she hummed her favorite Christmas carols. I knew in that fleeting instant just how special that string of lights must be to the resident in that second floor room just across the parking lot.