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Wishes


A moderator of the Buy Nothing Group I belong to on Facebook posted the following this week:

Make a wish this Wednesday!

We all have things that we've "always wanted to have". Post it here. Maybe someone has one just waiting for you to speak up! I know a lot of us really get a kick out of being able to gift something that would mean a lot to someone else.. Happy gifting!

I couldn’t think of anything to wish for.

What came to mind instead were all the wishes I have had that have come true over the years. First I thought of how two friends, who were downsizing, sold me an original Evergleam aluminum Christmas tree for a laughably affordable price, when they learned I had been pining for one for years. They even threw in a functioning color wheel to go with it.

I thought of my first Christmas with my now-husband, where I was at the Mall with my daughter and we put Christmas letters to Santa in a mailbox put out for that purpose. Mine said, “thank you for everything. Please give someone else their wish.”

When I was divorced and a single parent living in a small apartment my daughter and I used to repeat the mantra, “Some day we'll live in a house with an upstairs and a downstairs and a washer and a dryer and a yard and a treehouse.”  How blessed we were for our wishes to come true.

Well, except the tree house. You can’t have everything. But I do love watching Tree House Masters on tv and, you never know. Life isn’t over yet.

I started writing in elementary school and dreamed off and on of “being a writer.” It was a dream that wasn’t fully formed and life and marriage and motherhood and divorce and many other things have intervened and shaped my journey. Somehow I have grown into being a writer in my own way and it has become a big chunk of who I am.

All of these wishes came true in the community which has become “my home town”, although I didn’t grow up here. Columbia/HoCo has become so much a part of me that it’s an integral part of my wishes-come-true. Funny, that. I never wished for a community. But it turned out that I wanted one all along.

Like many of you I find that this time of year reinforces feelings of overwork, being overwhelmed, and not having enough energy or time to prepare for the holidays. Yet when I looked at an opportunity to ask for anything I might have always wanted, all I could think of was how many of my wishes have been answered.


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