In the winter of 1975, my parents divorced. My mother had a chronic heart condition that made it impossible for her to work and the two of us couldn’t quite make ends meet that first year on our own.

In previous years, Christmas had been a grand event in our home. Money had always been scarce, but my parents scrimped and saved for the holidays.

My first memories are of bright lights, rich smells and a pile of gifts with my name on them. That year, however, would be different. My mother received a meager social security check each month that almost, but not quite, covered the bare essentials, with nothing left for the luxuries of Christmas.

I remember that most of our meals consisted of potatoes and the big blocks of American cheese that the government passed out at the Social Security office. My mother, alone for the first time in her life, found it difficult to put aside her own hurts and fears and participate in the holidays. I do remember that we had a small tree and brought a box of decorations down from the closet shelf, but there wasn’t much joy in our home that year.

One thing that did worry my mother was that there was no money for gifts that year. She fretted over this for weeks but the funds just were not there for presents. One day, a neighbor told her about a local toy charity, an organization dedicated to providing donated presents for children in need. My mother applied for the program and visited their office, bringing home a small box of gifts, which she wrapped and hid under her bed.

The night before Christmas, we ate our baked potatoes, and Mom read to me from a book of children’s Christmas stories. Just before bedtime, there was a knock at the door, and my mother answered to find a young woman who had just moved in next door to us. She was Hispanic, speaking very broken English, and had twin sons who were my own age. She was also divorced and was in as bad, or worse, financial straits as we were. She came to the door asking to borrow some flour and looked so exhausted that Mother invited her in and made her a cup of tea. I was hustled off to bed, lest I still be up when Santa made his appearance, and they stayed up and talked awhile.

I remember my mother coming into my room and gently waking me up, then sitting on the side of my bed and asking me if I minded if we had company for Christmas. I said no, unused to have my opinion asked in such matters. Then she took my hand and asked if it would be all right with me if Santa gave some of my presents to the two little boys next door. I thought about this for a while, wondering why Santa couldn’t bring them their own presents, but somehow my young brain sensed that it would make mother happy, and she hadn’t seemed happy in a long while, so I hesitantly agreed. Mother kissed my forehead, and I went back to sleep.

The next morning I awoke to the most wonderful smell wafting under my bedroom door. Hunger banished even the memory of Christmas from my mind, and I ran from my room to the kitchen to find the source of that glorious aroma. I skidded to a stop as I rounded the corner into a strange dark-faced woman standing at my mother’s stove. She was rolling out tortillas and dropping them into a smoking pan, while a large pot bubbled noisily on the back burner.

I blinked one or twice in confusion, until my mother walked in, then remembered that we had company, and even more importantly, that today was Christmas! I spun on my heels and ran into the living room to look under the tree. Two little Mexican boys sat, looking uncertainly around them, on our couch. Several small wrapped packages lay beneath the tree.

Mom followed me in and began to pass out presents, there were just enough for one gift each. I gazed longingly at the brightly wrapped packages in these stranger’s hands, knowing they should have been mine, clutching my solitary present tightly to my chest. I unwrapped the box to find a GI Joe action figure, the old fashioned kind with the moving knees and elbows, the kind that came with a little rifle and a little backpack and a string that you pulled to make them say cool army things. Except mine didn’t have a rifle, or a backpack, and there was only a hole in the back where the string had once gone. I stood there in the middle of the living room, my lip trembling, clutching my broken toy.

I looked to see what the other boys had gotten, what gifts I had missed out on. One package revealed a cap pistol (without caps) and a worn plastic holster (I had a much nicer set in the toy box in my room), the second box revealed a plastic bag full of legos, in various shapes and sizes. I stood there and watched these two boys whooping and laughing like these were the only toys they had, turning their meager gifts over and over in awe, and suddenly I realized, that these were the only toys they had. Soon I would learn that these two, who would become my closest pals, each had exactly two shirts, two pairs of pants, and a worn sleeping bag that they shared on the floor of their room.

As I watched my mother talking to this strange woman in our kitchen, tears running down their cheeks, I was suddenly happy that she had woken me up, that Santa had shared my presents with these boys, for how terrible would it have been to wake up with nothing under the tree, no presents to play with, no Santa at all?

The boys, Jay and Julio, followed me to my room, where I showed them, to their amazement, the wealth of my toy box. Soon we were playing like old friends, until called out for a breakfast of seasoned eggs and potatoes wrapped in fresh, warm tortillas. It was the best breakfast I could ever remember having.

I’ll never forget that morning, as I’ll never forget my friends from Mexico who taught me that there is always something to be thankful for, often much more than we think.

When I was a boy, my mother had a small plaque that hung in the kitchen of our tiny apartment.

It read: A house is made of brick and stone, but a home is made of love alone.

My wife and I had planned on being the typical American couple. We’d get married; work for a couple of years (to earn some stability and get to know one another), and then start our family. We had seen our friends follow this same agenda, and it seemed simple enough.

We learned it was not always so simple…

Years of self-doubt, frustration and bittersweet smiles as we held the new-born babies of our closest friends, all the while agonizing over the empty place in our own home and hearts, the frustration of not being able to give each other the baby we wanted so badly, while longing to be the parents that we KNEW God had made us to be.

Finally, after a decade of trying and reaching the ripe-old age of thirty-eight, we realized that having a baby just wasn’t going to happen the “old-fashioned way.”

So, we sought help.

Only to find that “help” is expensive…help is very expensive.

The process of IVF (in-vitro fertilization) and a subsequent pregnancy and birth would cost tens of thousands of dollars. We had three hundred dollars in the bank.

It was a long night at the dinner table. There was anger, and there were tears. How could God put such a burning desire, such a lifelong goal to be parents in our hearts, and then make it impossible to achieve?

We didn’t have tens of thousands of dollars…we didn’t have one thousand dollars…but we did have our house.

Years of scrimping and saving, driving clunker cars and brown-bagging lunches had allowed us to pay off our school debts and save just enough for a down payment on a beautiful little three-bedroom, two-bath house on the outskirts of town.

Vickie and I both worked full time, living in tiny apartments in bad neighborhoods to save money, crunching numbers until they squeaked and jumping though every hoop imaginable for ten years to buy that house. It wasn’t much, but it was ours. For a kid who’d never lived anywhere but apartment complexes, it was everything – a place to have friends over, to plant our own flowers, and to paint the walls whatever shade of purple we pleased…a place of our own. It had been like a dream come true when, three years before, we’d signed papers and moved in, and now it was being made clear to us…

We could have our baby…if we gave up our home.

The market was ripe, and our agent assured us that we could get our asking price, which would leave us just enough to pay off our few remaining debts, complete the IVF process and find a small apartment near our jobs.

We talked. We argued. We cried.

Finally, we prayed.

That’s when we realized that everything we had scrimped and saved and sacrificed for had been leading to this moment. We weren’t being forced out of our home; we were being given an opportunity to have the child we’d always wanted…

…and all we had to trade for our miracle baby was this block of brick and stone.

People all over the world suffered through childless lives, and we had been given a blank check. A check with three bedrooms, two baths and a garage…

…all we had to do was sign it.

And we did.

More sacrifices were made, possessions were sold, and more tears were shed when we stood in the living room of yet another, tiny two-bedroom apartment. Then the innumerable trips to the doctor, the embarrassing medical tests, the extremely candid conversations with nurses, and the seemingly-unending “are we” or “aren’t we” months of limbo, hope and heart-break.

It’s been three years since we sold our dream house, and our daughter Grace just turned one. Nothing about her addition to our family was easy, not her conception, her birth or her first weeks at home, but she has brought light to our lives that no windows could and colors to our world that no flowers can ever match…she is truly our miracle baby.

We’re saving again for a house, and we’ve moved to a larger apartment, where I work part-time from home and take care of our daughter. Sometimes we talk fondly about our dream house and the memories are bittersweet.

Then baby Grace smiles and laughs and hugs our necks, and we remember that it was just a house, brick and stone, and that this is our home…these aging rented walls, because they have been made of love.

I sometimes watch my co-workers as they search desperately for friendship and have to shake my head. Hitting singles bars, parties, even church groups, desperate to find someone…anyone to keep them from being alone. It makes me sad to think that many of them don’t realize that there is an almost entirely forgotten generation, most of whom are even lonelier than they.

Mrs. Vick had been my mother’s dearest friend. She’d been our neighbor for many years in the rundown apartment complexes of the Portland suburbs. Neither woman had been in the best of health, both were dirt poor and barely able to pay their bills. They had formed a bond, of sorts, out of desperation.

When one was feeling well enough to make the half-mile walk to the store, there would be a knock on the other’s door, asking if she needed food, or maybe a prescription filled. When the end of the month neared, and groceries grew short, cupboards would be opened, refrigerators emptied and casseroles or pots of soup made with whatever ingredients were available between them. They laughed together over I Love Lucy and cried together over All My Children.

In this way, two aging women, alone in the world except for the children they were raising on their own, found a way to survive.

When the power would go out in the dead of winter, we would bundle up in old quilts, troupe down to Mrs. Vick’s apartment and huddle around her ancient kerosene heater. When summer baked the cracked sidewalks and weed-ridden dirt lawns, Mrs. Vick would bring a pitcher of iced lemonade and sit on the balcony of our second-story apartment with us, hoping to catch the errant breeze.

This was the way of things until my senior year in high school, when Mrs. Vick suddenly moved away. Her health had deteriorated until she was forced to move in with her eldest daughter. That fall, shortly before Thanksgiving, our seedy old apartment building caught fire and burned to the ground.

Everything we owned was consumed, clothing, furniture and the few family heirlooms we possessed, when the ancient wiring finally gave out and ignited within the walls. The insurance company wrote us a small check, and Mother and I moved into a nearby rental house. Shortly afterwards, following a long battle with her failing kidneys, Mother passed away. I grieved, of course, but I knew that she was happy to be free from her thrice-weekly dialysis regimes, which had come to be a nightmare for both of us.

Three years later I was finishing nursing school and had taken a night position at a local eldercare facility. As I made the morning rounds with my medication tray, the name on the door of room 201 caught my eye…

Elizabeth Vick.

I knocked softly on the door and entered and, sure enough, it was the same Mrs. Vick who had shared our struggles through all of those summers and winters. Her white hair was thinning, and her frail hands shook with palsy now, but the same tough, resilient spark shone in her eyes. She remembered me, of course, and was overjoyed to have me sit at her bedside and talk about the “old days” with her.

I spent many breaks and lunches in room 201, reading Mrs. Vick the latest letter from her daughters, and telling her about the comings and goings of my life, to which she listened with rapt attention.

One day I mentioned the fire that had destroyed all of our belongings, and Mrs. Vick suddenly began to cry, small tears slowly tracking down her weathered cheeks. She pointed to the small closet on the far wall of her room and told me to look inside the cardboard box in the far corner.

Inside were a number of old keepsakes, including a cheap cardboard photo album.

This she asked me to bring to her, which I did, and she turned the pages slowly until she found the one she was looking for and handed the album to me.

Now it was my turn to cry! There, under a yellowing sheet of plastic, were the only four remaining pictures of my mother to exist anywhere. Two were summer shots of the balcony (both taken by me with Mrs. Vick’s old Konica), the third was of my 12th birthday party and the last picture was from an early Christmas. In this last photo, I sat in my mother’s lap, smiling hugely, as her arms were wrapped tight around my tiny shoulders, and her head rested against my own. On her face was the sweet smile that sometimes seemed so hard to remember.

With a trembling hand, Mrs. Vick removed the old photo from the book and handed it to me.

“Sometimes,” she whispered, “God makes us find our gifts from Him. I never would have remembered these pictures if you hadn’t come and sat with me everyday.”

I leaned down and took her frail body in my arms, our tears mingling as I squeezed her as hard as I dared.

That was almost three years ago. I’ve switched jobs twice, and moved once, but I’ve never forgotten Mrs. Vick. I still drive out to that nursing home two or three times a week.

In the summer, when the air conditioners in the new building make the rooms just a little too cool for her failing circulation, I’ll bring bottles of sugar-free lemonade, and we’ll sit on the shady veranda and watch the Columbia river roll by. We read letters from her daughters (and granddaughters), talk about life as it used to be, and sometimes we just sit and enjoy the warmth.

On my desk at home sit three frames. The largest, in the center, holds my nursing certificate. To the right is a small photo of a smiling little girl in her mother’s lap, and on the right is that same child, many years later, sharing a lemonade with her oldest and dearest friend.