small fires

My friend comes over for dinner and while the ragu simmers, I pour the wine and she reorganizes the contents of my pantry.

“We do not do conflict well,” she says, as she stacks the canned tomatoes. She is talking about the man she is living with. “We had a fight about a sweet potato.”

My son runs in, breathless, to report something that he has seen on television. “Do you know what?” he says. “The whole planet just exploded,” he shouts and runs out again.

We were at the grocery store, she says, and I wanted to get sweet potatoes and he didn’t want them, but I bought one anyway. Later, when I made it – for myself – I asked him if he wanted to try it.

“I’ve already told you I don’t want it,” he says. “How many more times are you going to ask?”

“He was kind of yelling at me. There was no reason to get so upset,” she says. “I just wanted him to try it.”

I nod. I fill a pot with water, put it on the stove to boil. “And then he hardly talked to me the rest of the night.”

—

I read a book about a woman whose husband disappears for long weeks and months at a time. Their children are small. She learns to raise them on her own.

After a long separation, he returns. And a few days later, the young daughter finds her mother crying, asks her why she is sad. She uses the word, “heartache.”

She says: “Things are never the way you’d imagined them. Sometimes waiting for an event is so overwhelming that when it happens you have no strength left for it.”

“You’ll see,” her mother tells her, “it’s late. You’ve got to sleep. You’ll see.”

Years later, the daughter remembers this scene as her mother’s life nears its end. “He’d come back,” she says. “He’d performed no miracle.”

She goes on: “What I’d see later is something you never dared teach me, because life means we each are left to our own fate: that heartaches are solitary and, like us, live out their lives to the end.”

—

It is late. I am lying in bed and I remember that earlier, my son had wanted to show me something. He had set up some sort of tableau with his toys that he wanted me to see. Not now, I kept telling him. Later. First there was dinner to make and then dishes to clear and then back in the car to pick up my daughter. While we waited in the parking lot for her, he read with a flashlight. And on our way home, he fell asleep.

I carried him upstairs in his coat and shoes. I put him in bed, took off his shoes, unzipped the coat, slipped his arms out and pulled it from under him. He slept. I brought the blanket up to his chin. When I leaned down to kiss him, his cheek was so warm.

—

My doctor is running late, so in the waiting room, I try to read. When I am finally called, I am ushered into a small exam room where I undress as instructed, wrap the thin cotton robe around me. More waiting.

She is apologetic. She taps at her keyboard. Runs through her list of questions. Any hospitalizations, any surgeries, any medications. I shake my head. She looks up. I say aloud, “no, no no.”

She asks about my children and I tell her they are fine. That we are starting to look at colleges. “That’s exciting,” she says. I nod.

And you are eating well? Exercising? Sleeping? I nod. Tell her “pretty much.” And it is true. She is not asking after all about my dreams of water. Or about my waking in the night to stare at the blades of the ceiling fan.

She listens to my heart. She presses her hands into my stomach. She writes a few things down on a green form, hands it to me. “It all looks great,” she says as she stands up to leave. “If you need anything at all,” she says, “just give a call.”

She leaves me to dress. On the wall, there is a poster about a balanced diet. Across the bottom, cartoon drawings of fruit with faces and stick arms and legs. They are holding hands. A chorus line of sorts. One apple, one pear, one orange, one banana. Perhaps it goes without saying: This does not make me want to eat fruit.

—

From time to time, when I meet someone new and I tell them, for one reason or another that I am adopted, one of the first questions they will ask is: Have you done a search?

I have and I haven’t. Every few years, I will send an email or two, make a few inquiries. I will copy down the number to my case file, the only identifying information that I have, paste it into online forms, wait.

Then I will reach a stumbling block: No, there is no file for you here. No, your parents did not leave anything here for you, and I will stop.

I like to think sometimes of the reunion. Imagine it:

An airport. A hotel lobby. A train station terminal. Somewhere people do not stay for long. Liminal space. The anticipation. The excitement. Her hands on my hands. We scan each other’s faces for things we recognize.

And for the time we are there, we say the things we can say; we cry. We hold each other. We touch each other on the face and arms.

And the time passes that way – an hour, maybe two. And then it is done. We will have found each other, but no miracle will have been performed.

—

Then someone might ask: Will you keep searching? Do you want to? And sometimes, I will leave it open-ended. I might, I will say. Some day.

But I don’t think that I will. I don’t know really, that I’d have the strength for such a thing. After forty years of waiting, how could a reunion bear all the weight of anticipation? I have imagined it and in time, won’t that imagining take on the shape and contours of memory?

And as I live out my own solitary heartache to its end, won’t that imagined memory – steeped as it is in fantasy, in childish anticipation – bring its own kind of comfort?

—

My friend is in a performance and her mother is visiting from out of town. She asks me will I spend some time with her, pick her up, take her to the show. So I drive to her house and call her mother as I approach. She meets me by front door. We chat amiably on the ride over. We park and walk to the theatre. Conversation is easy, cheerful.

We wait in the lobby. She asks about my children. I tell her how I feel like I am always running. Working, running errands, dropping them off and picking them up.

I was always so busy, my friend’s mother says, when she was little. Now, I have more time. Now, she is the one who is always busy. And now I have all this time to take care of her.

All the rain and wind. All the dark hours. All the cold mornings.

After work, I walk down to the new bar that has opened and sit in the corner by the window and wait. I am meeting friends here. There is much to catch up on.

R. is thinking about moving out of state again, and L. is in the process of buying a house with some land. We talk about what it is like, living here for so long. The smallness of it. As if on cue, two women walk in who we all know, and a cheer goes up from the table as we greet them. Embraces all around.

—

When M. packed up his parents’ house, his father said: “I didn’t expect to live in such a small town for all these years. I never saw myself this way. But that’s how it happened. And here I am.”

He found a photo album tucked away in a closet. It had been his uncle’s, his father’s brother. It traced the years from careless youth to his service in the war. In the last several pages, he stands in ruined landscapes. This is just after the war has ended. Here, standing near the gates of Buchenwald. Here, near the bodies of unburied dead.

Soon after his return, the story goes, he meets a woman, falls in love. She is killed in a car accident that he survives. It seems he never recovers from this loss. He dies young, stricken with cancer at forty-two. In this short life, all he has seen and done. All that he had lost.

—

At work, my office is cold. I sit rubbing my hands together as I stare at the glowing screen. People are talking in the hallway. The hum of printing machines. My phone rings and I answer it. We talk for a long time about the restoration of an old church. I will send you photographs, she says, of the stained glass windows.

Of the detailed archways, the stonework. Of the murals in the sanctuary.

—

An old friend comes over to eat with us and after, we sit at the table in the dim light and talk about mid-life; about our children, our anxieties. I find myself telling the same stories repeatedly. They are not really stories, even. My friend who is a painter… The day I drove to the ocean… The things I did after my mother died.

My friend is patient. She has heard these all before. I can see this in her face even as she nods and encourages me to continue. Even as she smiles and laughs in the right places. But these are all the stories I know, I am thinking. There are patterns here, repeating. I am circling something I don’t yet know how to say.

“You seem to need to say things with your body,” I was once told. I had skidded into a tree, running. “Be careful,” I was told. “Your body is your temple for the holy spirit.”

It was a funny thing to hear, being as fearful a child as I was. Being as tentative with my body as I was. This rare moment of carelessness. A scrape on my forehead. My shoulder bruised. A bit of wind knocked out of me. Holy spirit, perhaps, escaping through my open mouth.

After she leaves, the day is quiet. I do laundry, make soup. Roast some parsnips and carrots. I respond to a letter from a friend far away. “I have such a small life,” she writes, “so small and so quiet.”

—

I wake from strange dreams of water. A pool in which a woman I do not recognize swims laps. I am standing nearby, watching. Then I am filling a hole in the earth with water running from a garden hose. Then I am wading in a cool stream that runs over slick rocks beneath a canopy of trees.

I leave the house in the dark, in the cold. White half moon high in the sky. I am thinking about the woman swimming laps in my dream. Down and back, soundlessly in the long empty pool as if she has only ever done just this.

We drive back from New York in the snow. Or I should say that M. drives and I sleep and when I wake, disoriented, I see snow flying at us, the sky white with it, before I drift back to sleep. 

The week has felt long. The stunning cold. A frozen pipe has caused domestic distress. 

—

At the office I am sad and tired, and so I walk to the museum at lunchtime and wander through. There is an exhibit on contemporary art and design and I linger there, drawn in by the Lagerfeld dress and a large Cy Twombly painting that I remember from my first visit, decades ago. Some names are familiar: Jackson Pollack, Grace Hartigan, Louise Bourgeois, Ernesto Pujol. But others are not: Wifredo Lam, Alice Neel, Janine Antoni, and the new exhilarates. I write the names down on the museum map to look up later. 

I stand in front of a Rothko painting for a long time. You can see the frayed edges of the canvas along the sides of the frame. I want so badly to touch them. The line of staples down the length of it - imperfect, crooked. The reminders that this was made by human hands. 

There are only a few people in the museum while I am there. I love the quiet, the solemnity, the sounds of my own footsteps.

—

We spent the last hours of the last night in the city in the hotel bar. We stayed out late. 

In the morning, we drove along the west side, stopped at the air and space museum for the boy, who had spotted its hulking structure in the river on the ride down. It is an aircraft carrier and inside, we climb all the narrow stairs to the flight deck. The steps are like ladders, the rungs barely wide enough for a child’s foot to rest. 

On the way down, he loses his balance and falls to the bottom, crying. I scoop him up. “I don’t want to go down anymore steps,” he says, but there is no other way to get back to the main floor. 

I tell him I will go in front of him, very slowly and he won’t fall because I will be there. And so we descend that way, one slow step at a time, my hands gripping the rails as tightly as I can, his small body close to mine.

—

The cold is wearying. The wind. There is sun, but the weather reports refer to it as “ineffective.” There are predictions of more snow. 

—

Here is something I am reading. The poem is called “After Sappho.” It is Hoa Nguyen, from her collection As Long as Trees Last:

Tell the mists again
The will gains so much

Find my mouth as moss

Latching my key
She holds these

Hold and blow     tough as night
     Hope-bow     tugged tight

Artful calling     how larks
mark heat     down low

Can all it be     Told
mesh meant     Keeping

your your your

—

I joined a little writing group. We’ve met once now in the lovely home of one of the women. She takes us upstairs to her attic loft and we drink tea from white cups and we read to each other and we talk about writing. 

I bring a story I have not yet shared with anyone. I read it aloud and in the reading, I hear things I didn’t know I was trying to do. By the time I am finished, I notice my hands shaking. From the cold, but also from the fear of reading something so new and so unfinished. It seems important, I think, to feel that fear sometimes. 

—

I meet a friend I’ve not seen in some time at the new bar downtown and we sit in the corner by the window and watch people walk past. She tells me about her new love, its progress, its complications. They have now met each other’s families, each other’s friends. “I want you to meet him,” she says and I say yes, of course. “We had a little fight,” she says and I let her talk about it. I shake my head. “You don’t like him?” she says, although I have not yet said anything. “I only know what you tell me,” I tell her. 

We have ordered little plates and they arrive. She enumerates his best qualities. “He is kind, and charming, and thoughtful. He brings me flowers. He is honest.”

“You don’t need to defend him,” I say. “I only want you to be happy.” 

A woman walks past the window. Beneath the streetlamp, she pauses to light a cigarette, walks on. 

—

One more from Hoa Nguyen:

Absence and a Cushion
     The bite in the ribbon    -Gertrude Stein

Why is green   brown   and golden winter
Winter stays and spills gold for the clustered
Keel     Daub a day

this cup of mine     Heated heart
Carolina Wren
you hear stabbing gold

Is tea to drink     why reach to steep
if why is the brown cloth
of me pulled taut to reach you there

Out of hearts     Heat
Stab a day
dear Heart
that stays and spills

We keep us vowed     Cup of keep
pink there and brown   a heard hunt

Out of that we spill

Tea of you are days

Away I am
out there
sucking at leaves

—

In the morning, my son comes downstairs. “I couldn’t find anyone and it is dark.” He climbs onto my lap and I hold him. “We’re right here,” I tell him. “Just like always.”

“When I woke up, I was alone,” he says. “I don’t like it when I am alone.”

He goes over to the couch, curls up on it. I put a blanket over him. Back at my desk, I stare out the window. It is still dark. Anything I was thinking before is now lost. 

Now I am thinking: Yes, none of us has learned well to be alone. 

Away I am
out there
sucking at leaves

We enter the city on the west side. It is a bright afternoon and the Hudson River shimmers. Once at our hotel, we set out almost immediately. We don’t want to waste the light.

We are on 25th street between Sixth and Seventh. We head west for the High Line. “You are telling me,” says our son, “that this park floats above the ground?”

We laugh. “You’ll see what we mean,” I say. “It’s not that it floats exactly.”

We begin at the northern end and walk south, navigating the narrow path. Our son wants to run the width of it back and forth and stop in the middle and have “walking races,” so we spend much of our time trying to limit his interference with the flow of foot traffic and apologizing.

When the path opens out to little alcoves - a bench set back along a bit of train track visible beneath the weeds or a raised platform holding small iron sculptures - he is free to take up space and he does. He climbs the bench, walks along it, then jumps off. He is content to do this repeatedly, each time he lands, asking, “did you see?”

Back at the hotel room, I fall asleep for a time. I dream the rooftops of the city - the gridwork of vents and generators and fans laid atop the flat gray planes.

—

At night, we walk. Yellow taxicabs lined up along the sidewalk. We head north toward the bustle of Times Square, but before we get that far, we are drawn into a sleek-looking restaurant by the lure of low brown couches. Inside, we walk to the back instead, find a quiet section at the long bar. There is a muted hockey game on the screen we are facing. The bartender points to it. “There have been two fights already,” he tells us, with visible glee.

We talk about childhood. About the basements of our grandparents’ houses. Even after all this time, there are stories we have not yet shared.

There is a photo booth in the back of the bar and before we leave, we go in, draw the curtain. When we emerge, we stand by, waiting. A narrow strip of photos falls from a hidden opening. There are four shots, sepia-toned. In the first, we are looking in opposite directions, caught off guard, not ready. In the second, we are looking directly at the camera, M. scowling, me with a too-wide smile. In the third, we are facing each other, foreheads touching. In the last, I am leaning into him and he has reached up to put his hand in my hair.

We walk out, and I am holding the strip in my hand, waving it. The lure of capturing these moments: this clear, cold night suspended in time. These fleeting hours with no obligation except to one another’s company; except, perhaps to the memory of early, heady love. This nostalgia machine.

—

Our son is up early, announces it. Tells us: “I am feeling very awake.” We try to lie still for a while longer, enjoy the darkness, but he calls out again.

I rise, shower and as I am coming from the bathroom, I hear his voice. “I have another question,” he says, “about reincarnation.”

He has been preoccupied with death and we have given him books, talked to him. He seems to take comfort in the idea of reincarnation. “What’s your question?” my husband asks.

“When your soul goes into another body, do you become that person or that animal?”

—

We walk. The boy stops to pick up treasures on the sidewalk. He finds rubber bands and pennies. He picks up the small branch of a fir tree, says: “Look, a rare cactus.”

We take our time, the whole day stretching out before us. We have made no plans. We will let the day unfold, the long city blocks, the cold air, the bright sun.

There is a new bar downtown and we gather there like moths. The artists, the event planners, the fundraisers. The real estate developers, the graphic designers. The couple that owned the dance studio but have just sold it. Some of us are falling in love. Some falling out. Some of us are planning to move away any time now. We are all in various stages of waiting. 

There is a man I have seen around town for twenty years but have never spoken to. Tonight, we are introduced and we laugh. I know who you are, he says and I say the same. We pull up chairs at the same table with our friends. From where I am sitting I can see the streetlamp just outside the window. The yellow light flickers. 

At the end of the evening, everyone embraces and talks about the next time. Soon, we say. Soon. The man says something about twenty years and I say has it really been that long? It has, he says, it has. But you do not seem to have aged at all. 

—

Then there’s a magazine party and I go to that, too. I buy my drink tickets in advance, clutch them. A woman near the entrance throws her arms open, mistakes me for a Japanese woman we both know. I smile, shake my head, say my name. She looks confused for a moment, so I say my name again and bring my hand to my chest and pat it as if I were signing for the deaf. 

I thread my way through the clusters of people. At the bar, a young man in dark-rimmed glasses starts a conversation as he is waiting for his soda. He has started a business. He has moved here from New York. We chat for a while near the bar. We grew up in neighboring towns, it turns out and learning this makes me unreasonably cheerful. He mentions the name of another town and then the name of the school where his mother teaches, and I exclaim, “That is where I went to high school!” as if my days there were ones I ever cared to remember. 

Two young women I know come up to me and I introduce them to the young entrepreneur, slipping behind him and making my way for the door. 

—

My friend is waiting at a table near the fireplace when I arrive. We embrace. We talk about the afternoon. I took the train to the museum, wandered the exhibits until my legs ached. She took her son to a play space where they sang songs and clapped their hands and danced. This is not the way she expected to be spending her days.

He is up all night, she says. We have ordered a salad to share and she picks at it. Every hour on the hour, he wakes up screaming. 

I’ve gone back to ballet, she says. For years, she danced. She was invited to audition for professional dance companies although I don’t know how far into that she really got. Now, she has enlisted her mother-in-law to watch her son on Monday mornings, while she races for the train in tights, spends forty-five minutes at the barre and races back. An hour and a half tops, she says, but some weeks, I don’t even have that. Her husband travels all the time.

The weekends are the worst, she says. At least during the week, there is some structure, she says. The weekends are just endless. 

In high school, we were inseparable. We stayed close in college, but after, she left the area for a Ph.D. in political philosophy and published papers in journals and presented research at conferences while I married and then divorced and met my friends in bars.

Anyway, I am whining, she says, leaning forward. Enough of that. Tell me about you. 

—

I am struggling with the writing. Fits and starts. Fragments that lead nowhere. I feel depleted and tired. At the museum, while I walk through the exhibits, I take notes, hoping something will take hold later. It is important just to keep moving, I tell myself. Just to keep showing up, sitting in chairs and pawing at these keyboards. But I wonder how long I can tread water this way. 

I am struggling with the reading, too. I am dragging myself through the final passages of The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, the language seeming to grow denser, more strange even as I stare at the words on the page:

The accidents of fate that people hold to had long fallen away from him and had now lost even their spiced, bitter taste that was needed for pleasure and pain, and had become for him pure and nourishing. From the roots of his being there developed the firm, overwintering plant of a fruitful joyousness. He was totally immersed in gaining mastery of his inner life; he did not want to overlook anything, for he did not doubt that his love was in all of it, and increasing. 

—

I leave for the gym and it is still dark. The light has gone out on our porch long ago and we’ve not yet replaced it. When we have people here, I walk them to the door at the end of the night, apologizing. Be careful, I say, it’s so dark. Watch where you put your feet. 

When I get back, it is light. There is a bird sitting on the front lawn, pecking at the dirt. 

—

My son is preoccupied with death and so we find books for him. Tales of the Buddha, where a monkey tells stories of reincarnation. A book with drawings of insects and animals and plants that shows how every living thing must eventually die. 

The one he likes best is simple, direct. What is death? it asks. How can we ever really know? It talks about different religions and cultures. How each looks at death a little bit differently. No one really knows what happens after we die, the book says, but suggests that maybe death is not so different from things we know in life. 

When we go to sleep at night
and wake up in the morning,
we are still the same person
but it is a new day
and it’s almost like
being born again. 

When we learn
an important lesson in Life,
we let an old part of us die
and a new part is born. 

—

Back at the party, I run into someone I have not seen in many years. We talk about people we knew in common. Some who have moved away, others who have stayed. We talk about music, about the bars where we would go to hear the bands who came to town. So many places closed now. So few of those bands traveling through.

He tells me of this film he has seen about these musicians we once knew. He lists their names and affiliations. Some are familiar, but many are not. You should see it, he says. I think you’d like it. It’s really great, he says, to see all those people again. 

Sometimes when I am alone in my room, I see eyes staring at me in the dark.

This is what my son says, at three in the morning when I go to him. He has been whimpering. And before that, sighing loudly and turning over in his bed. He has been awake for some time.

The Beatles’ A Hard Day’s Night is playing in his room. He has taken to falling asleep to music. After reading together, after saying goodnight, we put on his CD player and let it play through once. If he wakes up in the night, we have told him, he can put it on again. At this hour, it seems so loud. I am desperate for silence. I let him come into bed with us.

Awake now, I lie in the stillness. Only the distant hum of cars on the highway. The mournful sound of a truck horn. I am aware of my arms aching as if I have been rowing boats all night in my dreams.

—

For me, the new year begins as the old one ends: feeling depleted. It is difficult, it seems, to carry out the simplest of tasks without great effort. I move through the days, through the lists and the schedules. I fall asleep sometimes, sitting upright on my couch. I blame it on the darkness, on winter. On the chill in the bones of my fingers.

—

In the evenings, I make soups and stews and freeze them. I peel potatoes and carrots. I slice onions. With the broad, flat blade of a knife, I crush garlic cloves to release them from their papery skins. Celery stalks. Leeks. I pinch parsley leaves from their stems. I run my fingers down sprigs of fresh thyme, collecting all the tiny leaves in a glass bowl. Swirl a few tender rosemary sprigs in hot oil. Throw in dried red chiles. For a time, the rhythms of the kitchen suspend sadness though it remains close. Like the stones my son gathers in a square of fine netting and ties with a bit of string. They are caught up, but visible: You could count them if you wanted to.

—

I read that sadness is anger turned inward and that anger is misdirected sadness and that grief, once felt, remains with you forever, carving long creases into your skin. In the shower, I notice a scar on my arm for an injury I do not remember sustaining. The skin is slightly raised, discolored, but there is no tenderness.

Living with grief, I was told after my mother died, is like learning to live with an open wound. It’s always there and you must accommodate it, treat it gingerly. Over time, you learn how to avoid further distress.

—

After we embrace in front of the restaurant, I walk the two blocks back to my car in the cold dark night, avoiding the icy patches that remain on the sidewalk and in the street. As I turn the corner, I see my friend, who is standing near her car, smoking a cigarette. I wave, but she does not see me. She is watching the smoke drift, mixed with her own warm breath.

I remember this as I drive into work this morning and while stopped at a light, I watch a young man cross in front of me and pause, in the middle of the street, to light his cigarette. He is hardly dressed for winter, in canvas shoes, cotton pants and a hooded sweatshirt. The careless indifference of youth. There is no warning, no admonition that penetrates.

In youth, I think it is not so much that you believe you might somehow cheat death, but more that you have not had sufficient opportunity to see the boundaries of your life. I think again of the roller coaster, approaching the summit of the final drop. It is not until you are perched at the peak that you can see where you will land. As you ascend, all you see is limitless sky.

—

My friend hands me a square of paper on which she has written: How helpless we are like netted birds, when we are caught by desire. It is attributed to Belva Plain. The image remains with me, these frightened birds, rendered flightless, their beaks pushing against the fabric that entraps them, flapping their useless wings.

The cruelest desire is the nameless one - the longing for something inarticulable. Born of absence - a wound internalized and buried deep beyond the reach of memory or of language.

It wakes you in your bed and you can hear it in the hum of the hulking flat trucks as they speed past.

—

Finally, my son sleeps. He is on his side, facing me, his chin upturned, his mouth open.

I would be content, I think, to sit here and watch him sleep for quite some time, but look now, the darkness is receding, giving way to the approaching light.

The streets are quiet. The week seems endless. This morning, at least, there is sun.

The writing is halting at best. A few notes before bed or an image on the way home from work that I jot down on a parking receipt while idling at a stop light. This waiting. For the new year to begin.

—

We returned from Rochester late at night in the cold dark, carried the sleeping boy to his bed, unloaded the car.

A stillness in the house, on the street – even down on the highway. In the office, I clear out old files, make lists, begin outlining the new year’s projects. People chatter in the hallway. They speak of their families and their travels. They tell of grandchildren and nieces and nephews. Their voices are animated and loud.

—

A soliloquy on stillness from Rilke’s The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge:

O night without objects. O out impassive windows, O carefully closed doors; settings from olden times, taken on, credited, never completely understood. O stillness in the staircase, stillness from adjoining rooms, stillness high up on the ceiling. O mother: O you, the only one who fended off all this stillness from me in the days of childhood. Who takes the stillness upon herself, saying: don’t be frightened, it’s me. Who has the courage in the night to completely be this shelter for what is afraid, what is desperate from fear. You strike a light, and are already the noise. And you hold the light in front of you and say: It’s me, don’t be frightened. And you put it down, slowly, and there is no doubt: it is you, you are the light around the kind, familiar things that are there without any deeper meaning, good, simple, unambiguous.

—

A comfort in returning to stillness. To the familiar worn objects of the home we have made. After dinner with M.’s parents, we walk them back to their rooms in the assisted living facility they now call home. In each room, there are objects I recognize. Quilted wall hangings, photographs. Books. His mother asks me for a tissue from the bathroom and beneath the mirror, I see she has taped a series of photos of my son and I pause there at the sink to keep myself from weeping.

This time last year, we peeled clementines and ate them standing up in our socked feet, all of us crowded into the kitchen of the family house. It is a bit of foolish sentimentality, I know, that keeps me returning there in my memory, but the end of the year always finds me wistful, vulnerable, all the old wounds open. This season with its expectations. This season with all its promises. The pressures this season exerts on the heart.

—

We spend Christmas morning at M.’s sister’s house and watch our son as he tears through gift after gift, the wrapping paper crumpled and strewn all over the carpeted floor. He is exuberant, loud. For a time, don’t we all rest our sadness down on his small head? The fullness of him, the roundness of his cheeks, his mouth still sticky from a rushed breakfast of cinnamon rolls and apple slices. He is alive and electric and wide-eyed. His delight.

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The drive home is quiet. The rest areas desolate, gray snow piled up in the parking lots. I sleep lightly while M. drives the endless highways. Our boy sleeps, too.

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Our families are scattered and we always end up traveling for Christmas. A few years ago, we started planning our own celebration on the weekend before the holiday, so we could have a day in our own home, a day we were all together, our tiny family. We maintained some of the rituals from each of our childhoods – for me, the table covered with sweets on Christmas Eve and for M., waffles for breakfast on Christmas. One year, it was a full week before the holiday, but we didn’t care. It was a Saturday and in the morning, we stumbled downstairs and gathered around the tree in our night clothes, exchanged our gifts. And as we all sit there in the luxury of a few lazy hours, a light snow falls. By afternoon, everything – the sidewalks, the front lawn, the porch steps, the tree branches – is still and quiet and shrouded in the freshly-fallen snow.