All four guys zip up parkas, snug down wool caps, grab the binocs and creep to the fence.
Eyeing the tree line some three hundred yards across the meadow, they stare and stare. They begin to hallucinate. First, individually, then en masse.
“I see one.”
“Look over there, just past that big, funny-looking bush.”
“THERE. See it? See, it’s moving.”
But no amount of conviction unearths an elk. It’s cold; snow is on the ground; they’ve crossed the continent for the Promised Land and there’s no gold. No milk. No honey.
Nothin’.
Uncle rallies. “Oh, I get it.”
Eyes hopeful, the three defeated nephews swivel their heads as one in his direction.
Uncle nods knowingly. “It’s Christmas time, that’s why.”
“Huh? What’s that got to do with it?” all three demand.
“Remember . . .” and, on the spot, Uncle begins a serenade. His voice floats over the entire meadow, a new twist on an old carol.
“No-o-elk, No-elk . . .”
The nephews are stunned. They actually lean away from Uncle, mouths agape, struck dumb, incredulous.
“No-o-elk, No-elk . . .”
They can’t believe what they’re hearing. Adam, the eldest, recovers first. “You brought us all the way out here to do THAT?”
In turn, the others arrive at the same conclusion: They’ve been had. Shagged. Deceived. Misled. Tricked.
“Aw, man.”
“I can’t believe it.”
“Du-ude . . .”
They turn from the fence and toward Uncle. He’s about to be a dead man. He knows it—and he can’t wait.
The nephews attack full force, wrestle him down, pound on him, sit on him, jump on him and pelt him with snow. He resists not at all.
It’s great. He earned it; he loves it. He loves them.
And they love him.
James Daigh
Nothin’ Says Lovin’ Like . . .
Christmas was coming, and I didn’t have one ounce of spirit or energy. I couldn’t even muster a half-hearted “ho-ho.” I was a gray heap of sorrow, enmeshed in my own pity party.
I had taken a last walk with my closest friend that year and still grieved her passing. Neither of my away-from-home daughters would be able to get back for the holidays. My recently retired husband, grappling with his own identity, didn’t or couldn’t see that I was a mess. My joints ached; I felt old, looked old and was losing my grip on things that had always been so sure and steady in my life. I slogged through my days, unable to even recognize myself.
I mourned for the past when everything ran smoothly: The girls were growing; I was busy and involved in their lives; my husband was working. My grief had reached crisis proportions after our move across town a few months earlier. Even my neighbors had been replaced with strangers.
I tried walking the new neighborhood. I tried holiday shopping. I even saw a movie or two. But I felt like I had lost my way. Then the phone rang one afternoon.
“Isabel,” a voice chirped. “It’s Julie. Nicholas is wondering if you’re planning your annual cookie-baking day. Are you?”
Ever since Nicholas was able to toddle across my kitchen in the old neighborhood, we’d had tea together and baked cookies. This year, his younger brother Zachary was old enough to join the activities.
“Oh Julie, I don’t think . . .” I paused and mustered some false enthusiasm. “Of course I’m going to bake with Nicholas. And send Zachary along, too. It’ll be great!”
I set the date and hung up the phone with a weight sitting in the bottom of my stomach like a wad of raw cookie dough. This was the last thing in the world I wanted— two little boys racing all over my house, my kitchen and my life. Still, it would be nice to carry on an old tradition.
Down the block lived another child, a quiet little thing, sometimes peeking out at me from behind a large ash tree in her front yard. One day I saw her sitting idly on the curb and, recognizing a kindred spirit, joined her.
“Hi. I’m Isabel. I moved in over there,” I pointed, “and I’m lonesome because I don’t know anybody. What’s your name?”
“Kelsey,” she answered. “I don’t have anything to do.”
“Hmm. Well, I’ve got just the thing,” I heard myself saying. “Tomorrow my friends Nicholas and Zachary are coming to bake cookies. Would you like to come?”
Kelsey’s mother eagerly brought her over the next morning. Standing on my doorstep were three grinning kids and two parents. I told the grown-ups that it would take about three hours, but I’d call when everybody was ready to go home.
And the four of us got started.
We measured.
We mixed.
We laughed when flour powdered our faces and hair.
The dough was over-rolled and over-handled, but it didn’t seem to matter. Nor did anyone care when the cookie-cutter shapes were crooked or lopsided. And there were no tears shed over the burned sheet of Christmas trees that set off the smoke alarm. Instead, we discovered they made splendid Frisbees to bulls-eye the frozen birdbath out back.
Amid singing and conversations both long and short, I hauled out the frosting: red and green pastry tubes that oozed both top and bottom. After a minilesson in rosette making, the three little ones practiced squeezing the sugar concoction onto the countertop. Did you know that red and green icing turns mouth, teeth and tongue an awful purple? Even my own!
Tiny fingers pressed raisin eyes and red cinnamon buttons onto gingerbread fronts. The kids ate two for every one they used. Colored sugar sprinkled the table, the Santa cookies and the floor.
Secrets were whispered, little hurts mended and problems solved while we downed three refills of beyond-sugary sugarplum tea in real china cups.
And—miracle of miracles—frosted holiday cookies, divided by lacy paper doilies, were all neatly packed in white boxes decorated with “Merry-Christmas-I-love-you” tags when the doorbell rang. Six hours later.
“I thought you came here to decorate cookies, not yourselves,” Kelsey’s mother teased. All three kids grinned back with purple teeth. I kept my own mouth closed.
“I miss you, Isabel.” Nicholas grabbed me around the waist before he left. “The lady in your old house doesn’t make us cookies or tea.”
“Yeah,” chimed in Zachary.
“One day,” I smiled, holding Nick’s rosy cheeks in both my hands, “you’re going to grow up, and you won’t want to bake Christmas cookies anymore. And I’ll understand.”
“Oh no, Isabel! I will never, never be too old for you. I love you.”
“I love you, too,” said Zachary.
“Me, too,” whispered Kelsey.
And suddenly they were stuck to me like Velcro.
Christmas came. I invited all the old neighbors and a few of the new ones. My daughters phoned, bereft and homesick, and, of course, we all cried. I still missed my friend. And my husband didn’t change at all. But the most important thing I learned that year was:
When life seems sorrowful—reach out.
Find children.
Bake cookies.
Isabel Bearman Bucher
Chords of Love
She lay prostrate on the wooden floor, unable to lift her head or move her body. Five minutes passed. Ten. Fifteen. All because she’d reached for a Christmas ornament and fallen out of her wheelchair.
What a day for John to be late, she thought, as her immovable position grew more and more uncomfortable.
The wedding photo on the table had tipped over with her. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw a beautiful bride and a handsome groom, each with Irish blue eyes and dark hair. Friends told her that raising three children hadn’t aged either of them one bit.
John’s car crunched in the snowy driveway. Her heart pounded as she heard him leap the stairs of their split-level home two at a time, eager to see his wife. Stunned to find her on the floor, John dropped to his knees—and wept with her.
Not out of sympathy. Peg’s quips disarmed any of that maudlin stuff. Out of love—the deepest kind.
At that almost sacred moment, I intruded. “Oh I’m sorry,” I said.
According to my custom as Peg’s physical therapist, I had knocked and let myself in. Her husband dried his tears, scooped up her thin body, paralyzed from multiple sclerosis, and carried her to the bathroom. This was his habit every lunch hour.
“I’d do the same for you if things were reversed,” Peg told him, her pluck restored.
“No you wouldn’t. I’m too big for you,” he said with a broad smile as he placed her back in her electric wheelchair, flipped on the Christmas tree lights and left for work.
“Do you hurt today after the fall?” I took off my hooded coat and red scarf.
“No, go ahead and do the routine,” Peg said, then added, “I went to the counselor yesterday.”
“How did that go?” I stretched her arm.
“Okay, until he asked, ‘How’s your intimate life?’ I answered him, ‘Fine, how’s yours?’ That quieted him right down.”
No one tampered with this lady’s love life or, for that matter, with her willingness to persevere. When therapy was over, she asked me to place a nativity set on her lap tray so she could arrange it. She knew her fingers were useless, but hey, why not give it a try? It was the holidays.
I shook my head with wonder.
Eager to show my love for this special couple, that very evening I gathered a group of carolers outside their family room window. I saw Peg seated in her wheelchair before the fireplace and John behind her like a tall, protective sentinel.
One, two, three. We struck the first chords, “Deck the halls with boughs of holly . . .” Trombone lifted, bells ringing, we sang a festive medley.
They invited us in for our grand finale, “We Wish You a Merry Christmas.” The oven smelled of John’s pumpkin bread. A little shy of strangers, they retreated to the back of the garland-strewn room.
When we strolled away, I glanced through the frosty window at Peg’s forever smile. Her husband had resumed his attentive stance—her guardian, lover, friend for life. Oh, sure, Peg and John were pleased we had serenaded them. But their happiness came not from others. It came from an unbreakable cord of love, the kind that binds.
Once upon a time I had skimmed through a photographic album about couples. The artist prefaced his work with the words, “We two form a multitude.” Surely, he must have known Peg and John.
Margaret Lang
Charlie’s Coat
She’d been on a halfhearted hunt for some misplaced Christmas stockings when she found the coat—warm and soft, brown and dear—in the very back of her bedroom closet, hiding behind a big box of Glenn Miller albums. The sight of it shocked, surprised and saddened her. All three emotions gathered in one scary lump in the space between her throat and her permanently broken heart.
Why hadn’t she found it before? Charlie had been gone a year to the day, and she’d been in that closet countless times. She’d pilfered through it like a teary-eyed madwoman looking for bits and pieces of the man she’d loved all of her life, things that were his, things he’d worn. Faded flannel shirts—his second skin from September through every April—broken-in Levi’s with permanent white creases sharp enough to slice a loaf of homemade bread and his shoes.
Oh God, the shoes.
Empty shoes, just sitting there all alone. Except for the coat, they were the hardest things to look at. Reebok walkers, white on white, his old standbys. She’d bought them just two weeks before he passed away.
Where was the man who filled those shoes?
Not here. Not sitting with her on the side of the bed, not out in the woodshop, not at the corner take-out, not jawing at the fence with the neighbors, not dangling a grandkid on his knee, not here in this house.
Where he belonged.
Ginny made herself stand, take two small steps, and with eyes closed, reach to the back of the closet. There, she thought. She felt it. See? She could feel that coat and not go to pieces. But could she hold it, asked a small, inner voice. Could she smell it, look at it? And while she wondered, it hit her again . . . how did it get here, and where had it been for a whole, long year?
She’d told the kids she wanted it back. She didn’t care which one of them had taken it. She knew it was out of love that they conspired to hide it away, like a piece of hurt she wouldn’t have to see. She knew, she knew . . . out of sight, out of mind.
But they had insisted, all three of them, that they did not hide the coat, the chocolate brown barn coat she’d given him their first Christmas, 1962. The one he wore to work every day for the next twenty-five years, the one she’d teasingly threatened to toss away when the pockets wore off and the deep ribs became smooth and dull and the points on the collar curled up. The one he insisted on keeping long after it was presentable.
In less than a breath, she reached up now, on her toes, and tugged at the coat with all the loneliness and despair and gut-wrenching longing that was in her, and just as suddenly, with great care and respect and love, she pulled it to her small, shaking frame and slipped it on, one arm at a time, until she could double the breast, and then held on tight, and remembered.
“A bee-yoo-tee-ful lady I knew bought it for me,” he’d said, “and I’m not about to give it up.”
She still remembered the pain and the pride she’d felt when he’d said that, looking at her like she was the best thing he could ever hope to possess, and she’d understood. He most certainly had been the finest thing she had ever known.
And oh, that did it. That single, long-ago moment broke the dam. Just his quiet words, “It was the first time in my life, Ginny, that anyone ever loved me enough to buy me a new coat, a brand-new coat. Thank you for that, for loving me like that.”
And after the horrible pangs of his sudden death, she’d searched for it everywhere. She’d torn the house up looking for it and hadn’t been able to find it. But now here it was, one year later, wrapped all around her. The snow was falling, the Christmas bells were ringing, it was growing dark, and here it was.
Ginny pulled the coat tighter and bent her face to the collar. She breathed in and found the scent of pine wood-chips, English Leather, good, strong coffee . . . and Charlie. She took another deep, deep breath from way, way down and every moment she’d ever shared with him flashed before her mind and her heart, and she snuggled even further into the warmth.
Oh, yes. She’d loved him that Christmas so long ago. And all the Christmases in between. And she loved him still, this Christmas, when there was nothing left of him except the memories.
And his old brown coat.
Robin Clephane Steward
Flashing Back
It wouldn’t be Christmas without the memory of my dad taking the annual holiday photo. I carry a mental image of his hairline with the camera blocking his face and the unsnapped case dangling beneath it like the protective gear of a catcher’s mask.
But nothing protected Dad from the hubbub of five kids on Christmas Day. The Christmas commotion clashed with his German temperament, driving him to create order out of the chaos.
So he created the ritual. None of us could eat dinner, or even touch our forks, before he took the holiday picture. His payoff was some peace, if only for a precious few minutes.
“I need quiet,” he commanded, “or else it will take me even longer to set up.”
We rolled our eyes—the only things we could move without disturbing the pose. The focus of his attention was a Zeiss Ikon Contaflex One, purchased when we were stationed in Europe. A manual 35 millimeter camera, it required endless calculations and adjustments before he dared click the shutter. I’m sure it was a dad just like him who inspired some kid to invent the Kodak Instamatic®!
For what seemed like hours leading up to the photo, he made us sit still in our assigned places around the table. He looked through the viewfinder every few seconds. He read—and reread—the ins
truction booklet. He peered through reading glasses to carefully manipulate the camera’s settings.
And Mom offered us no sympathy.
“Be patient with your father,” she advised. “Someday, when you’re grown up, you’ll thank him for doing this.”
It turns out Mom was right.
Years after leaving home, I pawed through a box in her basement and discovered the Christmas pictures. I looked closely at each one and realized that, instinctively, Dad had almost replicated the poses each year. The changes were so minor that the photos resembled animation cells. I placed them in chronological order, earliest at the bottom, and began to flip through the years.
I notice how the images changed at the sides of the table where a highchair moved in and out of the frame like a ping-pong ball as each toddler grew out of it. Finally, Gretchen, Carolyn, Jan and I were all seated at the table. Seven frames later the high chair moved into place again with the family caboose, Bart. Our heights increased with the years and so did our hairstyles: from pixie, to beehive, to pageboy. We were always in Sunday dress, and Mom’s clothes mirrored the decades.
But little changed at the head of the table.
With no evidence of him dashing to his own spot in front of the camera, Dad sported an every-hair-in-place military crew cut. He always wore a white shirt and a necktie that exactly matched his trousers. His left hand gripped an oversized fork impaling the turkey breast. His right hand held a knife poised to carve. It is a sign of the times when I see a white cord that stretched from a wall socket to Dad’s new electric knife.
It’s all there, captured year after year, as we held our places and our smiles, waiting for the Dad’s diligently preset timer to click our pose.
My life story is told in those photographs, in all that is seen and unseen. And I smile, recalling the adage about what a picture is worth. Thank goodness Dad loved us enough to ignore our groans and snap them.
Kathryn Beisner
It’s So Lover-ly