I sat alone at my dining room table on New Year’s Eve with a glass of red wine. I’d poured it more out of habit than anything else.
I had made reservations at a little Italian restaurant downtown that I liked. Candles on the tables. A piano player on the weekends.
Then, around four o’clock that afternoon, I canceled them.
It had suddenly seemed absurd. Getting dressed up. Driving downtown. Sitting at a table for one on New Year’s Eve, surrounded by couples and families. The waiter asking, “Just one tonight, ma’am?”
So I stayed home.
Marjorie had added a second string of lights along her fence. They blinked in a slow, cheerful rhythm through my dining room window. Red. Green. White.
The house was very quiet. Just the furnace humming and the clock on the wall.
At 11:45, I made a cup of chamomile tea. I left the wine where it was, still almost full.
At 11:59, I found myself thinking about my mother.
My mother lived alone for the last eleven years of her life, after my father passed. In that same little house in Scranton. She never once complained about it. Not one time.
She gardened. She read mystery novels. She volunteered at the library on Tuesdays and Thursdays. She went to Mass every Sunday and had lunch with her friend Dorothy afterward.
Every time I visited, I’d look around that quiet little house and feel so sad for her.
I’d always assumed her life was lonely. Small. Something to be pitied.
Sitting at my own dining room table that night, with my untouched wine and my chamomile tea and Marjorie’s blinking lights, I started to understand something.
It might not have been sad at all.
It might have been something else entirely.
Freedom, maybe. Peace. A woman who had spent fifty years taking care of everybody else, finally living exactly the way she wanted. Answering to no one.
Outside, somewhere down the street, I heard people start counting down.
Ten. Nine. Eight.
I didn’t count along.
Fireworks went off over the high school. Somebody’s car horn honked. Marjorie’s dog started barking.
At 12:01, my phone rang.
It was Todd.
Sophia Rivers is an experienced News Content Editor with a sharp eye for detail and a passion for delivering accurate and engaging news stories. At TheArchivists, she specializes in curating, editing, and presenting news content that informs and resonates with a global audience.
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