She’s my secret Santa of summer.
But her good deeds are not restricted to summer; I just like the soft sound of the three “S” words together. Every Sunday morning she rescues my newspaper from the driveway and secures it safely inside my courtyard. I’m not sure it is a she, but I have a strong hunch. If it turns out that she is actually a he, please know I appreciate you just as much.
It all started when I wrote a column about my missing Sunday paper. For several weeks in a row, I made my way down the porch steps, through the courtyard and over the front lawn to the driveway, only to find the paper missing. I asked whoever was taking it to please leave the page with my Senior Moments column on it, as I like to clip it every week.
I tend to be a sleep-in-on-Sunday type, so I was never up early enough to get the paper before someone disappeared it. The truth is, I am a born-and-bred night person who only once voluntarily arose at predawn to see the sunrise over Sedona, Arizona, when George and I were visiting. And that was because he bribed me with a thermos of hot chocolate that I could only redeem by getting into the car so we could drive to the perfect spot he had selected for the viewing.
Getting back to Santa for a moment reminds me of the first Christmas after George and I blended our family of three preteen girls. To her surprise, my daughter Sara received a gift marked “from your secret Santa.” We all had fun trying to guess who that might be. This continued year after year, widening our circle of guesses each time. Thirty-eight years later, we still don’t know the identity of the secret Santa.
It struck me on this rainy day, as I picked up my paper carefully tucked away from the rain, that not knowing was a gift of its own. In both cases, wondering who the mystery gift giver was had me mentally sorting through a list of people I knew who were kind enough to be the suspect. Each year the list grew bigger.
The case of my Secret Santa has me thinking about people I have never met in person but have bonded with through the words of this column. That’s a rare jewel to ponder as I sit on my front porch swing watching raindrops glisten like diamonds on the purple bougainvillea.
Email patriciabunin@sbcglobal.net. Follow her on Patriciabunin.com