Today I received a box of fruit from Harvey's Groves in Florida. It is the "Christmas Tree" - oranges and grapefruit in a tree-shaped design (try to picture it) and a box of crackers and some marmalade to form the base. It's very cheery in a 1950s sort of way. Back in the day boxes from Florida were like sending sunshine in the middle of a long dark winter; they were visions of Boca and Miami and the Seven Mile Bridge. They were maybe even a bit of the kinder, gentler Hemingway hanging out with all his cats down in the Keys.

They were the gifts my father always sent home.

Every year, as long as I can remember, my father bought a box of oranges from Harvey's Groves for my grandparents and each of my aunts. They lived in New England (one aunt in Upstate NY) and thirty years ago fresh oranges in the middle of December was a treat. Every year my father bought them a box; every year we had the conversation about when he would order the boxes for the relatives up north. And today a box came for me.

When my father died, almost ten years ago (how can it be ten years?), it was summer and my brother and I weren't thinking about the holidays. Six months later, in December, my brother called and asked about the fruit. No one was going to be sending it that year and it seemed wrong to him - to both of us. So he went to Harvey's and he bought the oranges and he became the one who sent boxes to RI (and now MA). Three boxes still going north, even though the cards said from Patrick Mondor now, instead of from Robert.

So things didn't really change, right?

My Memere died a few years ago and this year my Pepere is very ill. He turned 93 a few months ago and he is failing. Slowly, like a clock winding down, he is failing. Eating fruit in December is no longer a pleasure, or honestly even a possibility. So at Harvey's last week my brother was sending only two boxes. He told me today on the phone that he started thinking about Daddy, about the all the years gone by, and he thought maybe a box of fruit for me this year, maybe some Florida sunshine for my northern Christmas. And so I'm looking at that Harvey's Groves logo right here on my kitchen counter and I know it's supposed to cheer me up, make me happy with all this snow and cold and gale force winds due to arrive tomorrow evening and yet I just keep seeing that box in the context of who we were way back when. It's not just oranges for us; it's Florida in a box and that means our father and that means who we were on those days when it was the three of us and who we were before the divorce when we were always the four of us and mostly it just means that somehow it is very nearly ten years since my father died.

How can it not just be yesterday?

It was lovely that my brother sent this box and I love him mostly because he is someone who would do this - who would stand at Harvey's and think not just of where the boxes were going but where they came from, who they came from. And he would remember all of this just like I do and so he sent it to me because he knows that it's not just a box.

He knows that it's something that can break my heart and fill it at the same time.

Merry Christmans, from Harvey's Groves.