This angel graces the top of our xmas tree most years.

She was given to me when I was very small by my great aunt Elizabeth, who lived in my grandparents’ house. The angel used to carry a wand in her right hand.

When I was a little kid in Sault Ste. Siberia, my grandparents lived a countable number of blocks away from our shabby little Superior Street bungalow. 8-9-10, I will have to count them the next time I’m up there. And I still GO there thanks to my grandparents passing vacation properties to their children and grandchildren. Thank you!

When I was a little kid, two great-aunts lived with my grandparents in their big house on John Street. There was my eccentric great aunt Ann (Grandma’s sister), who lived in the attic and I’ll talk about her some other day except that she lived to be 103 and I wasn’t named after her but I always worried that I might have been… (I was actually named after Anne of Green Gables, who didn’t like her name either.)

The other great-aunt was Elizabeth (Granddaddy’s sister) and she died when I was seven, my first funeral. I admit I was often a little afraid of Elizabeth. She could be “severe” with small children sometimes (she did not marry or have children). But she could also be kind and I have a particular memory of her that I cherish. When me and my cousins were little kids spending our summers at the Old Cabin, we slept on the Front Porch, which we loved (more on that some other day). One night a thunderstorm rolled in to the moominbeach and there was LOTS of thunder and lightning and we were all pretty scared, or at least I was. Great aunt Elizabeth suddenly appeared to close the numerous big windows and reassure us that the thunder was just Thor (the Norse god, right) rolling his bowling ball.

So whether or not the angel was given to ME or my family (I am unclear on that), I somehow absconded with it when I made my own home here on The Planet Ann Arbor. Wouldn’t you know that the first time we used her as our own tree-topper, her wand somehow got destroyed. I can’t remember what kind of errant weapon did the dirty deed but this was WELL before the Blowgun Era🤪😵‍💫🤣

When I was writing this I was thinking about a song by Lucinda Williams that I thought was called Broken Angel. It is not. It is Drunken Angel. But close enough. (Not that the person who caused the accident was actually drunk when it happened.)

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