When I first married my husband, he worked at the Neiman Marcus warehouse in Dallas while I attended high school.  He lifted weights and had arms strong enough to carry the world on his shoulders.  Through the years that’s exactly what he has done. Those strong arms and back have worked relentlessly to get us both through school and to carry my dysfunctional family through many a trial.

After we married, every Christmas season we would accumulate more and more holiday items to decorate our home; so much, in fact, that it filled the attic.  Every year, beginning in November and ending in January, all of the boxes are carefully carried one at a time on the back of my ex-warehouse man husband.

He uses the ornaments and whatnots to decorate each and every corner of our home.   For one wonderful season, we enjoy the colors and the lights of Christmas right in our own wonderland.

Then in January, I help pack things away in paper and bubble wrap in the same containers he brought down in November. After that, he trudges up and down the stairs again to place them carefully back in the attic until next year.

Now in his sixties, I watch him carry the boxes with the ease of a twenty-year-old, remember the handsome young man I fell in love with all those years ago, and sigh like the young girl who still lives inside of me.