It doesn’t have a great deal of significance for anyone else, I admit that.
I knew it was just a random scrap of paper. The print was almost faded, but still legible.
It was simply an old receipt from the Duty Free Shop at Dorval Airport in 2000, exactly eight years before the Christmas when we said our final goodbye.
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The record of the financial transaction wasn’t important. Merely, a current reminder of the once constant flow of his care, that is still desperately needed. I understood that when I viewed the small white crumbled receipt.
Two of the Fabulous Four had arranged a surprise Christmas gift for me. One, the younger of the pair, had driven five hours in order for me to board a nonstop flight and visit his brother’s family for the holiday season. Then he also presented me with the greatest gift, a generosity of time, by boarding and being my traveling companion.
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I am not quite fragile (at least I don’t believe I am) but I was filled this year with unusual anxiety due to a complexity of issues.
Everything had been arranged so efficiently by the two brothers, and I was consumed with gratitude for their thoughtful generosity of time and love. They comprehended that I had begun more and more to retreat into a comfort zone of environmental familiarity and had not traveled extensively for quite a length of time.
My trip went smoothly due to their exquisite planning. Brother greeted brother at the San Diego airport transferring the care of their wilted Mother.
I slept soundly after a warm welcome by the CA branch of our clan, and the following morning, my older son said, “Mom wait until you see what I just found.”
He explained the night before I arrived in CA, when going through the few items he had kept from his Dad, he discovered the tiny scrap of paper.
The words printed on the white wilted receipt read CHLOE perfume, and it was the scent I always wore during the years of our marriage. The wrinkled sliver of paper recorded one of the last Christmas gifts I had received before the final illness that separated us.
And I remembered I never travel alone.
