Christmas Flight

There are a lot of ways to die and this isn't in my top five (peacefully sleeping and death by chocolate being among the favorites) but I buckle in and lay my whole life into the hands of one dorky brother-in-law as we vibrate down the little country airstrip, headphones crackling and bodies bouncing in the cramped back seat.  And, like it's nothing, we're airborne.  We're flying.  The taillight perforates our little cabin with blinking red and ice rings the lake beneath us like cool frosting.

The world is smaller from the air.  Owen Sound and Mount Forest are neighbours meeting nightlight bloom in a sky that rocks and holds us on wings of nothing.  We bank tight and Walmart is a dollhouse and cars are just fireflies drifting along Highway 4 and for one small moment I am wildly free...

A Restless Eve

"Mommy?"  His pajamas are too small and his hair is too long and his bare feet wiggle against the kitchen floor and he twists his fingers together because he's sure that he's in trouble.  This is his third time up.

My hands are sticky with sweet marinade and the wrapping up of water chestnuts with bacon and I turn to him without lifting my hands from the cutting board.  "Liam, you have to sleep...Santa won't come."

He sniffles.  "I was dust heawing Zander banging his feet and screaming, 'Santa is here! Santa is here!' and I tan't sweep."

There are heavy bags beneath his eyes and he's so tuckered from the long day he spent with me at work and the long night with the magical candlelight service and his stellar 'O Come All Ye Faithful' lip syncing from the mezzanine and the picking of the choicest clementine for Rudolph because of course reindeer need Vitamin C as much as everyone else.  He crosses the kitchen and wraps his arms around my waist.

"Was Zander really doing that?" I ask, stabbing a toothpick through a chestnut and finally washing my hands.  He doesn't let go of me as I turn to the sink.

"Nooooo," he wails, burying his face in my sweater, tears in his voice. "It's dust all in my head and I tan't sweep."

I unwrap his arms from me like I'm opening a present and I bite against laughing at his overacting imagination.  "You have to sleep, Liam."

"I know," he whimpers.  Then he wipes his nose on my sleeve and stumbles back to bed after and quick kiss on the top of his head.

Love Letter For A Stranger

The day is ugly like the sun forgot us.  Grey rolls in heavy and dim and it still feels like night when the kids stumble - heat-starved - out to catch the bus.  Winds groan and there's no way it can be five days until Christmas because the grass still waves it's 'you-should-have-cut-me one-more-time' face and mud coats the car like armor and these snow tires are kicking up back-road filth instead of any snow-globe magic.  I think about carving BAH HUMBUG into the thick dust along the passenger door.  I'm trying.  Really, I am.  Trying to catch a moment to catch the season but it's all floating about like some demented dead leaf that doesn't realize it should be buried beneath a blanket of pallid beauty.  Where are you, Christmas?

Tires growl over all this dirt and I pull into a line too long but I can't face the cold so I take my place behind the white SUV with it's white custom family stickers and wait.  And wait.  And wait.  And we're a contamination train and we're puffing our hot exhaust breath out into this world that's dying all around us and I'm pretty sure Santa is crying and baby Jesus is crying and we're all crying because...UGH!

The line crawls.  I place my order.  The line crawls.  They're talking on the radio about some poor woman who is fighting for her right to wear a niqab on the witness stand and I think 'who is anybody to tell anybody what they can or can't wear?'

I come to the window and I'm right grim.  I hold out my coin that can't catch a gleam because the sun forgot to get up this morning.  The girl at the window holds up her hand in refusal, fingers peeking out the end of cut-off gloves - her face all merry and bright.  "The lady ahead of you paid for this.  She wanted me to say, 'Merry Christmas'."

And I take it like a punch in the chest and things are strangely brighter and I take the cup and the smell of sweetened cappuccino fills my filthy car and like the grinch I feel my heart grow three sizes.  I rush forward to catch the white SUV before it pulls in to traffic, sneak up beside her and try to catch her eye with a wave.  I don't think she saw me as she pulled away.  Just a normal woman.  Just a stranger who gave $1.94 to restore my faith.  I feel the prick of a tear and the warmth of a hope and the swallowing down of a lump of guilt.

Ah, Christmas...
        there you are...you were there all the time, weren't you?...
                I just stopped looking.

A Motion For Fun!

Zander is the grade six rep to Student's Council for his class.  This is an important role in which he gets to contribute to the discussion about important things.  And this is the inspired motion he brought before the council at their last meeting:

Sick of Sick

Even her hands are hot with fever.  She traces my eyebrows with warm fingers, following down along my jaw, my lips, my nose - touch tender and sweet.  She's memorizing the lines of my face, her eyes half-focused and glassy in their mission, making sure she can remember me if I get abducted in the night while she sleeps.  "You're sick and I'm sick," she says.

"We are," I agree.

"So, we have to take tare of each udder?"

And I tuck her up close against my chest and set my chin against her hair and squeeze with whatever strength the fever hasn't sapped from me.  "Yes, we have to take care of each other."

I don't really know how she does it - wrapping up this sickness in sweetness because all I want to do is sleep or cry.  She spends her time nestling against me, lacing her fingers through mine over and over again and whispering, "Are you feeling better yet, Mommy?"

And because this wretched cough has stolen my voice I can only whisper back while my eyes water and my throat burns, "No!"  And her hand will come up and find my hair and she'll tap my head affectionately until she falls asleep, sickness breathing out of her in what sounds like the strange purring of a feral cat.

Days and nights and they're all the same and children's television programing becomes increasingly obnoxious and I actually miss going to work and I can't be there to support my sister and her presentation and suffocating on a cough while I realize I've never taught my six-year-old about 911 and I have visions of myself lying dead on the bathroom floor but then it's over and he just says, "What was dat all about? Were you like chocking or sumting?" And sudoku and six movies and cough syrup that knocks me flat on my butt and Tina Fey wrote the funniest book I've ever read...

Please, God, let it be over.

Tonight I tuck her beneath her pink blankets and kiss her nose and whisper how sorry I am that I can't sing to her.  She just pats my face and says.  "Dat's okay.  Are you felling better yet, Mommy?"

"I think I am," I tell her.  "Are you feeling better yet, Noa?"

"A little bit," she says and her eyes fall closed before I can even leave the room.

Mailbox Musings

It leans towards the west like it knows that's where we came from, pressure-treated wood scarred from a hundred storms and a thousand letters.  There is something right about it - about the way it stands guard, here at the end of our beginning - some stoic sentry of blue-grey and stick-on font, red flag worn by weather and after-school fingers.

We've lived here four months now and still this placed is named for Austin.  It is the final nod to it's history - that last piece yet to rend from it's past and shine up with our future.

And I am loathe to change it.  Cringing against the idea of ripping that name from this sign post and bragging my own - even though the old is still mine somewhere deep inside me.  Maybe I'm crazy, but somehow that name makes it feel more like home and I feel an overwhelming need to preserve it in some manner, I just haven't decided how.

So, for now, it waits - like a silver tomb stone marking for the what was and all the good that past stands for.