No, the soap wasn’t for that.
So, let’s just move along here and make a clean break with what you were thinking.
I opened a lovely little package tied with a bow, a gift to me from one of my wife’s sisters.
It was a literal bar of soap.
Tears formed instantly.
My sister-in-law knew, and I knew, the story behind that bar of soap.
And now you, the reader, will too.
A couple of weeks or so before Christmas, I was grocery shopping which I’d never done before because my wife always did. I would occasionally push the shopping cart but it was my ever frugal Dutch wife that had researched prices, discounts, sales, cut the ads and off we would go.
But I had lost my wife of 50 years to cancer and here I found myself at the grocery store when the phone rang.
It was my sister-in-law, and she was crying. She was calling – and crying – because she was offering to host Christmas at her house this year.
It was supposed to have been my wife’s turn.
But I no longer had my wife.
So now we’re both crying.
Fellow shoppers walking by must have wondered why the gentleman in aisle seven had his handkerchief out, talking into his cell phone, and wiping his eyes.
“Where are you?” my sister-in-law asked over the phone.
“Well, at the moment, I’m in the soap section. I’m looking for bars of soap. Do you know how many different kinds of bars of soap there are? How did my wife do this?”
So, now you know the rest of the story.
