The sun’s trying to break through today, a balmy but warm afternoon with the temperature pushing 70.
The past four days, fog lingered in the hills and hollers, day into night into day. Everything assumed an eeriness, the ever present suggestion of phantoms in the woods.
Just before that we had two days of relentless rain, seven inches or so, leading into an unpredicted snowfall of three inches, gone by afternoon.
Next, another blast of of cold to welcome winter’s arrival, and Christmas next week. Seems a little less Christmasy this year, with people worried about work and all.
The mantle in our living room, from from it’s early days as a one room cabin, holds the happy scars of hundreds of Christmas stockings from the past century and a half or so. Anxious little kids grown up and gone back home to their maker. It’s our place now, but the suggestions of their Christmas mornings hang about that space, adding as much of the holiday cheer as the garlands, decorations and lights now about the place.
Joe Brown,who was a child in the house during the depression, told how happy he was to get a n orange, some nuts and candy and a toy or two, and what great Christmases that made. When we bought the place and opened the attic, we found a marble pinball game he received from an older brother and wife who’d left home for the promise of better jobs away from here. He made my kids a model of the kind of home made plane, a few scraps of wood and rubber bands, he received another year.
He’s gone now, but his Christmas memories, they’re part of our house, too.
No comments:
Post a Comment