My father hated it when I’d leave my brush on the kitchen counter. I get that. It’s a thing for your hair on a surface where you deal with food. For him, there were quite a few transgressions in this category: things that are not done, not mannerly, no good. Which is funny, because, as many of you know, it’s not like he was some super put together fancy or uptight guy. He was none of those things. He was casual, he was friendly, he was march-to-the-beat-of-your-own-drummer.

His particular and most upsetting pet peeves were all about his own set of internal rules, and putting a brush on the counter was unthinkable.

My girls now do this constantly. It doesn’t bother me like it bothered him, but I still tell them not to. And only recently did I think - based on the frequency with which they were doing this - that it might be him revisiting me from the beyond, delivering a cosmic joke.

I really did wonder. Kind of like when a bird or rabbit in the neighborhood gets unusually close to me while I’m on a run or walk, and I think that might be my dad, reincarnated in animal form and here for a quick visit. I think this naturally, in the same breath as ensuring my shoes are tied or considering what we are going to have for dinner.

My father died in 2017, and there are still days - rare days, but they happen - when I experience something he would have loved, or have a thought I would have shared with him, and quickly, like a flash, I think that I should call him to tell him about it. On those days the grief feels brand new again; the kind of grief that takes your breath away. Thankfully, expectedly, this doesn’t happen as often as it did in the beginning because time truly does help you get used to the loss.

I’ve been thinking recently about things like the brush on the counter, and the possibility of people being reincarnated as animals, visiting us over and over in our daily lives, and how I didn’t have the comfort of these funny, improbable little beliefs right after my father died. It took time. Because in the beginning all I could feel was the absence. It was so sharp and sudden and inconceivable. But the distance has given me the opportunity to get used to that absence and so, discover new ways of finding him in my life. I know it seems ridiculous but, to me, it also seems inevitable. How could you not find the people you love, over and over, in a life they helped define for you?

The other day Aidy left her brush on the counter, as always, and I said, “Nonno really hated this, and I don’t hate it as much as he did, but you should stop doing it.” She said ok, and wasn’t surprised by the fact that I brought up her grandfather, no longer with us, because she’s the type who lives with the assumption that spirits and angels are around all day every day, and if I told her that I thought a particular bird was…maybe, actually…Nonno, she’d say, “of course.”

Later that day I picked her up from school and as we were driving to our next stop, we looked at the Christmas decorations around the neighborhood. She was so full of love and magic and the promise of presents, and told me she wanted to put light-up reindeer on our lawn. I said, “maybe” (even though we are not going to do it, I couldn’t resist). And I thought, for this first time this holiday season, and maybe any holiday season, about how it was sad that it would all be over soon; about how there really is something to holding onto every single moment.