Inside the old cloth was a single ornament I had never seen in my life, and a note, folded small, in Mama handwriting. I untied it on the living room floor in the middle of all those familiar ornaments, and the strange one that was not familiar at all undid me completely.
It was a little glass bird, hand painted, the kind of thing you would buy at a church craft sale, plain and homemade next to the fancier ones. But she had wrapped it apart from everything else, in cloth instead of newspaper, set beneath the cotton batting where it would only be found by someone unpacking all the way to the very bottom.
The note told me why.
I bought this bird the year I knew I would not always be here to help you hang the tree. I put it at the bottom, saved for your first Christmas without me, so that on the hardest one you would still unwrap something new from your mother.
She knew. Some part of her knew, back whenever she tucked it away, that a Christmas was coming when I would climb into that attic with a heavy heart and haul her boxes down and put up a tree without her for the first time in my life. And she had planned for it. She had gone out and found one more ornament, one I had never hung and could not have any old memories of, and she had hidden it so that on the very worst Christmas I would still get to open a brand new gift from Mama.
I sat there and cried in a way I had not let myself cry since the funeral, holding a two dollar glass bird that turned out to be worth more than everything else in the house put together.
My grandbabies were in the next room. They came in and found me on the floor and asked what was wrong, and I told them nothing was wrong, that their great-grandmother had just sent me a Christmas present, and that it was the best one I ever got. Then I let the littlest one hang the bird, up high, where the worn glass bell used to get the place of honor.
That is where it lives now, at the top of the tree, the first thing I hang and the last thing I take down. My mother packed those ornaments away herself every single year, each glass ball in its newspaper, and I always thought she was just being careful. She was doing more than being careful. She was leaving me a trail of her love packed in tissue and cotton, and at the very end of it, she left a bird, and a note, and proof that a good mother finds a way to help you hang the tree even after she is gone.