Christmas at Mama's: 1976

For Jamie and Michelle, this would be their one Christmas Day at Mama's house--that last winter we lived in the Virginia mountains outside Charlottesville. But for Kimberly, who spent her first two Christmases here healing Mama's heart after Granddaddy Owens died, this Christmas was about coming home . . .

Like the angel on her white Christmas stocking, Kimberly was our hope on the darkest of days, in the darkest of times . . .


Above the mantle in this picture hung a portrait of her grandfather. There are no pictures of Kimberly with Granddaddy Owens--except the one in my memory.

It's a July afternoon in 1969. Daddy's sitting on one of those folding lawn chairs on the brick patio just outside the room pictured here, holding his first grandchild in his lap . . . I so want to snap that picture, for her, but I know he would want, in her created memory, to be the man in that portrait above the mantle. So I put the camera, and the wish, away--but never, ever, the memory of that July afternoon in 1969.