Christmas Coming

There were things we longed for then. Longed for them all the year round. Things we wouldn’t buy for ourselves, but hoped someone else might. That was back in the day when Coca Cola was something bought at a store to drink on the spot. For twenty-five cents. A treat. Like ice cream and candy bars.

There were so many things we didn’t have, that we were rich in longing. In looking forward to things. And there were a fair few number of things we didn’t know we didn’t have. And we didn’t miss them.

There is a little girl back there in that time. She’s standing on a front porch in the chill of an Alabama winter night. The porch floor is painted red, the last of multi-generations of paint layers. The pictures those imperfectly scraped old layers make are more noticeable in the shift of shadows and light from the windows of the house.

She is waiting in a plaid coat and a red velvet dress, the Christmas dress that her mother has made this year. Church services are over now, but she is allowed to leave it on, because it’s Christmas Eve.

They have moved. To a little house on a little lot, on a road between hills, in town. Even the horizon is snubbed here, and the girl is lonely.  There are no animals, except a few impersonal dogs and cats. No horses, no chickens, no cows, no quail, no rabbits.

The neighbors are different here. She can’t figure out what they do all day or where they go. But there is nobody around and nothing much interesting happens. Even her father goes off to work each morning.

There are no farmers in this neighborhood. No farriers. No orchard men. No mechanics. Everybody buys everything. Even their clothes come from the stores.

There are children, but they are afraid of her. Or of her dog, which pretty much amounts to the same thing.  The girl feels mean and ugly trying to chase him home so they won’t run away from her again. And she’s not sure exactly how to play with these town kids, anyway.

Her church, and all the people in it, are miles down the long highway.

She goes to school now. The first thing they taught her was the Itsy Bitsy Spider which she thought humiliating and a waste of time. Now, at least, she can read, which is her most prized skill.

Her father opens the door to ask if she wouldn’t rather come inside where it’s warm, and she says, no, she’ll wait here. He hesitates, then steps outside to stand with her.

Darlene did not move to town with them. The girl misses her, but she does not blame her imaginary friend. She wouldn’t have moved, either, if she hadn’t had to. She wonders if Darlene misses her, too. Here in town, she can’t even manage to pretend up Elvis anymore.

The worst part is that one by one, her sisters have married, and her brother as well,  and they’ve moved into their own homes. So now, it is just herself and her mother and father. In this town. Where nothing interesting ever happens, and where she finds it hard to even make up anything interesting.

            This night, the sky over the little valley is like the lining of a blue/black satin hat, and there are stars like the glisten of tears. It is sharp cold for Alabama. Cold enough for a plaid jacket. Cold enough to make the girl’s nose run.

            The scent of the cedar Christmas tree in the house is so strong it wafts onto the porch. That heavenly smell is a good repayment for the rash the tree left on her hands when she decorated it. Inside the house is as layered with smells as the porch is with paint; coffee and chocolate, coconut, sweet potato pie, warm pecans, and chili.

            The living room is small. The tree fills up a good eighth of the space. The lights are big bulbs of wild colors that were bought in the late 1950s but somehow manage to keep going year after year. All the ornaments on the tree have histories that the girl never tires of hearing.

Inside the house her mother moves around the kitchen singing along with Bing Crosby on the radio, just a few snatches of words here and there, and just off-key. The chili in the large pot bubbles. The mother stirs it, then moves to the counter to finish icing a cake. The kitchen is small, too, and as bright and happy as this woman.

The little girl hears snatches of her mother’s singing and catches the lilt of happiness in it. She reaches up for her father’s hand. He squeezes it, jingles the change in his pocket, and smiles down at her.

They are coming.

All at once, all together, the older children are coming home, bringing their own young families. The house will be full. The girl craves the sight of them like salt.

She stands on tiptoe and lifts her chin to look further down the road. Her father says it won’t be long now. They’ll be here soon.

The girl knows that when they arrive, there will be food and presents and laughter and teasing. There will be a long chain of hugging bodies. Children will be lifted up into loving arms and admired and tickled, and sometimes tossed around the room like acrobats while their uncles and fathers and the children themselves laugh, and their mothers and aunts turn their faces away in horror.

There will be bowls of chili passed from hand to hand and crisp grilled cheese sandwiches passed along as fast as they come off the griddle. There will be a river of iced tea and hot coffee.

There will be a confusion of presents and a riot of opening them. The children, including the girl, will joyfully wade through a crinkling sea of ripped, shredded wrapping paper, lifting and throwing it, draping it over the heads of annoyed adults before it is finally snatched up and tidied away.  Then the children, her included, will play with the empty boxes while the grown-ups tease more, and laugh more and talk longer.

After awhile they will all grow quieter and calmer for the last, sweet course. Everyone will crowd into the tiny kitchen and wriggle and jam themselves around the table for more coffee and cake and pie and cookies.

In that warm kitchen, the womb of the world, they will tell stories. Of their ancestors. Grandparents and aunts and uncles who died before the girl was born, and other people she can just remember. About the childhoods of her brother and sisters, or the courting days of her father and mother. Of the animals they knew and loved, and the people they knew and didn’t. Some of the stories are funny, some are sad. Listening to them, the girl will sometimes forget to breathe.

When the youngest children begin to fall asleep, the brother and sisters and their families will pack into the cars and drive into the sweet, sharp silence of midnight.

But right now, in the house, the mother and father and the girl wait. Wait for the ones they love, and Christmas, to come to them. What there is now, is longing. Longing, and looking forward. Christmas coming.

There will be many other Christmases for the girl. Some of them will bring complete happiness; a few will bring complete devastation. Years later, when she is a woman, when she has lived through Christmases in too many places to remember them all, this is what she will remember of the childhood ones. This is what she will see, and smell, and feel when she closes her eyes and casts herself back.

The waiting. The watching in the night. The sweet expectation. The view of the soft sky cut through with gemstone stars. The smell of her mother’s cooking and the sound of her singing voice. The feel of her father’s hard hand holding hers. Look up, he’d say, let’s us look for the Star of Bethlehem.

But the only stars the girl wants to see are twin headlights turning down the long, dark road,  toward the little house. They are coming. Surely they’ll be here soon. Surely by now, they are almost home.

Will make peace with the wing and the wheel.

 Merry Christmas. Thanks for coming. Come again, soon.

Leann

Remember That He's Gone

When I left for Alabama, the coming day was just a pink smudge on the horizon behind my left shoulder. The honeysuckle vines had begun to stretch their tendrils and reach for the next rail on the fence. The rosebuds dreamed on their stems.

As I pulled out of the driveway, I remembered when he was born. How our family waited for three days, my mother becoming increasingly, uncharacteristically fractious as she prayed for my sister to give birth safely. And he was safely born, despite his large size, and his mother’s preeclampsia. My sister, who’d been mad for a girl-child, forgot all about that the minute she held him, her first-born. He was such a blond fairy baby, all cherry-pink-and-apple-blossom-white. Such a beautiful, sweet boy.

By the time I hit the 81 South, the sun had cleared the horizon behind me and I’d remembered past the worst of it. How his mother was taken so young. In the time it took for a city truck to run a stop sign. How he survived that accident with stitches in his dandelion hair. I remember still, how they felt under my palm, those bloody, crusty cuts, when I rocked and comforted him that endless February afternoon. Her husband, my crazed parents and shocked siblings struggled with the technicalities of her sudden death. The arrangements. That tiny boy cried for his mother as least as long as it had taken him to be born. I cried with him. More death would come to us, and soon. I was eleven that year.

Passing Knoxville, I skimmed quickly over my memories after that. There is a reason that fairy tales contain dire consequences for motherless and fatherless children. A song kept playing on the radio that expressed my feelings of sadness and anger. And more sadness. And more anger.

I know that time stops for the grieving. In the space between hearing the news, and living through the funeral, life goes into an odd slow motion. Like being stuck on a merry-go-round in the wrong gear. And it feels so strange and unforgiveable to look out and see that, all around you, the world continues at normal speed.

After Chattanooga, I stopped remembering, and I began to contemplate what I was driving into.

His children are beautiful and smart and strong. His wife is loving and courageous. So I have the greatest hope that they will be alright now that he is gone. I pray for their comfort. And for the rest of us who loved him so.

I hope for some peace for the man who unknowingly drove a farm tractor in front of his loaded rig and watched it swerve, crash and ignite, shocked and horrified, as the cab burned down to the frame in what must have seemed like the pause between two breaths.

I left my hometown years ago. I’ve been many places. Wherever I was in the world, there was not a day in my life without him in it. Not a day without all of my family in it, especially the young ones. My niece and nephews, so close to my own age, so far from my own experience.

I saw them in the faces of my children, and of the children I worked with over the years. I held them close. They were always with me, wherever I was in the world. Someone once asked me if I believed that houses are haunted. I said I believed people are haunted, not houses. I believe it still.

At his memorial, I lingered to touch his motorcycle jacket and boots. I’d thought as we both aged, and our lives slowed, we’d have found time for each other again, someday. But he wasn’t granted age. Sometimes, there just isn’t any more. I headed back to Virginia in the dark of an early morning.

That fairy child grew up to be, in many ways, a hard man. Hard to know, hard on himself. A hard worker. Sometimes hard to live with. Now hard to live without. And hard to forget.

On the coldest day of this winter, they’ll release his ashes on the top of Cheaha Mountain, as he instructed his friends in one of those conversations we all have, but only half believe in.

When I pulled into my driveway, I could see that the rosebuds had emerged from their dreams into riots of flowers. The honeysuckle blossom thickened the air with a sweetness that was hard to bear. That song on the radio started over again just before I cut the engine.

I’ve seen him several times since then. A shadow on the floor. A movement at the corner of my eye. The rumble of his grown-man’s voice as the air conditioning hums into action. It's not him. It’s not the house. It’s me.  

All the winds of northern Alabama find their way to Bald Rock up on Cheaha. I can see just as clear how it will be on that cold day this winter. His ashes rising upward on the same winds the hawks ride, up there at the top of the mountain, swirling together higher, and higher, hanging in the air. Then drifting down, falling like the mercy that is surely owing to his children, into the valley where our ancestors lived and worked and died.

I hope I can be there on that day. I hope, in time, I can remember that he’s really gone.

Knows now there are some things she'll never understand

 Leann