Of the Season

In winter, there was a sacredness to everything, whether it was the bold red cardinal flaring against the fine white of a Sunday morning, the pine needles falling all over the red carpet next to the fireplace with a cracked flue, my father’s red hunting hat with the ear flaps hanging next to the door, or the garish nylon snowpants drying in the garage next to carelessly unlaced and kicked away boots. The nights came on quickly and stealthily, and I got off the bus in twilight some days, when the sun hid behind the thick rumpled clouds signaling an oncoming flurry. My brother and I rolled together countless, half-finished forts and scrabbled over the mountain of snow formed by the plow at the end of our driveway, playing king of the hill with shrieks and laughs.

Every evening, my family would flock to the cloth advent calendar, shaped like a tree with golden ornament beads all over it, and hang another small, stuffed ornament on it: a blond girl with a giant yellow 14 on her blue smock dress, a candy cane with a green 3 emblazoned on its center. Every year, we traipsed out, the five of us bundled up tight, to one of the many local tree farms and picked our favorite tree, often lopsided or misshapen because my mom loved the “special” trees. My dad worked the snarling chainsaw himself some years, while I stood back in awe with my hands stubbornly by my sides. We all dressed the tree together every year, marveling at forgotten ornaments, this one from Paris, that one from the glassblower in Mystic. Benton and I always claimed our favorite ones to hang ourselves: A surfer bear with his name on its board, a Santa that jumped when you pulled a string at the bottom, a plaster cast of my hand as a 2 year old. My parents hid the pickle ornament last on the new tree while Benton and I turned our backs, whispering to each other, and then whipped around to scrutinize it, not sure what we were competing for, just that we were competing.

We had a fire every night, had to have one in that house, eternally freezing, and on special nights, if I wheedled for long enough, my dad would sprinkle the magic powder over the fire that made it turn emerald green, vibrant blue, shimmering purple, palest pink, while Benton and I gasped and smiled before it and Dad stood proudly by. And at night, the creaks and groans of an aging house in a harsh season seemed like a lullaby to me, comforting rather than foreboding, like the house was muttering to itself, telling its own stories. There were no ghosts there.

I look back on what seemed so mundane at the time, and it’s only now—now, when I have a plastic tree, snowless Christmas after snowless Christmas, subdivisions everywhere instead of tree farms and white-topped forests, two homes, two deflated Christmas Days, the advent calendar missing all its pieces, the pickle vanished, my favorite ornaments broken or gone, a gas fireplace, the magic and friendliness gone out of my houses—it is only now that I appreciate what I had. Only now do I realize that truly, I was blessed.

And at night, when I lay awake in the glare of the streetlights instead of the light of the white moon, I remember those winter days, the gleaming white country laying out before me, the wonder in the eyes of a girl as she watched the snow fall and felt the warmth of a fire at her back, and I promise that I will be back, one day I will be back, and I can forget the suburbs ever existed.