Memories for Christmas

 

Here we are, almost Christmas Eve, and once again, I didn’t get everything done I meant to do this year.  I finally got my tree and my house decorated, but I didn’t get any cookies and candy made.  I had planned to make little treat boxes for my friends, but that doesn’t look like it’s going to happen.  I haven’t even taken the time to drive around and view Christmas lights, although that may still happen.  I spent way too much time playing with the dogs, sold a puppy along the way, and managed to plan and implement our church Christmas program.  Someone asked me why I bother will all the decorations when it’s just me.  The fact that it’s just me is exactly why I bother.  Over seventy years of memories is why I bother, not counting the memories from the years before I was even born.  I said the other day that it’s obscene how many decorations I have, but then I thought about how long I have been accumulating, not to mention all the stuff my mom and grandmother and great-grandmother accumulated and it’s actually surprising that the house can hold all of it!  And just about everything holds a memory.

There is my collection of Christmas dogs, beginning with a little white terrier in a Santa hat  I bought not long after Robert and I were married.
 There are the things my mom and I made when we were all into sewing and crafts – a braided fabric wreath and stuffed Christmas wreath and a stuffed bear my aunt made for me.  There is my old Christmas stocking and a wooden sleigh from my childhood that may have also been my daddy’s.

 
There are the ornaments that my friends made for me, or gave me, and ornaments my family gave me.  Some of the ornaments on my tree came from my great grandmother’s trees, and my grandparent’s trees, then the trees my parents decorated when I was just a baby, and the trees my husband and I decorated.  There are some tarnished bells that I still use every year because, as discolored as they are, they remind me of those childhood Christmases with my Colley relatives, when they would drive down from Nashville and Franklin, calling out “Christmas Gift” as they walked in the door and bringing what I thought were exotic dishes like mincemeat pie and scalloped oysters and gifts from places like Castner Knott and Cain Sloan. 

And books, always a new book, usually about horses.  I have dozens of inscribed books, beginning with little Golden Books my family gave me all the way through my childhood to teenaged novels I received.

 My family were all great readers.  Growing up, there were shelves and shelves of books in our house with names of people I never even knew in person, but knew through the pages of the books they left.  Anne of Green Gables, The Secret Garden, the works of Charles Dickens, Black Beauty, Peter Pan – I was introduced to books like those, not in school, but during lazy summers in the porch swing. The first time I read A Christmas Carol was from a maroon covered set of Dickens that belonged to my great grandfather Tom Colley.  The print was so small, it's a wonder I was able to do it!

I remember listening wide-eyed to stories of my grandmother and her sisters remembering Christmases when they were children in the big house their father built in town when he brought his new wife from Franklin to the wilds of small-town Centerville. 

That house, with its window seats, wide front porch and gabled windows became a source of fascination to me.  They made it sound like something from a book, with stories of church on Christmas Eve and Christmas mornings when their father would get up early to build a fire in the library fireplace so they could open their gifts under the tree.  Sometimes I wish that house was still there, but then sometimes I think that it might be better that the house just lives on in my imagination.  It would be disturbing if it had been altered and modernized, or worse still, fallen into disrepair and decay.  And I have the piano, a dining room buffet and a bookcase that came from that house to remind me of that past, along with those little tarnished Christmas bells that I still love, not because of their beauty but because of the memories they hold.

More recent memories involve my mom and houseful of kids she “kept” after she retired from public work.  I can still hear echoes of squeals of laughter as they opened the presents they exchanged in a sea of wrapping paper and ribbons.  I can still see them all, sitting around the big dining room table, and arguing over the last piece of cornbread or that last spoonful of corn.  They were family too, and I hope they hold good memories of those days.  They read some of the same books I read, Little Golden books from my childhood and books like Little House on the Prairie that had been read by three generations of our family. 

I have pictures of so many of the kids in my daddy’s lap with books, and I remember the days when I would visit and hear small voices begging “read to me.”  I hope they read to their own children now and I hope they tell them about their memories of times on the farm when they were growing up.  This house holds a lot of good memories and if there are ghosts, they are peaceful and mild-mannered ghosts.  I feel them at my elbow sometimes as I sit by the fire with the dogs, watching the Christmas lights twinkle and holding fast to good memories.  Those memories are the only Christmas gift I need.

 

 

 

 

Thanksgiving Night

 

Thanksgiving night is one of my favorite times.  Too tired to do anything other than sit by the fire.  The dogs are worn out too – they had too much company and too many scraps from the Thanksgiving table.  They are sprawled all over the living room, Sophie in her spot near the fire, Carli in her favorite spot behind the couch and the others sleeping wherever they happened to drop.

We had twenty people for dinner, a dozen around the big dining room table that has held unthinkable numbers of family and friends over at least a century of use. Four generations were at the table. It was good to see the house filled with family again; it’s a house intended for large gatherings.  A second table in the living room held some of the younger bunch – young couples just starting their lives together, with two of those couples about to become three by this time next year.   The dogs, when they made it inside, were well-behaved for the most part, although Scout kept scouting the table and countertops for accessible food. There was lots of talk, lots of laughter, an indecent amount of food and memories sprinkled with plans for the future. It was good to have the house full of people.  I tend to get so used to rattling around in this big house alone, I forget what it was like growing up in a full house. One of my cousins took the cradle that my great-great grandfather made not long after the Civil War.  It's been sitting in my back room since it was last used by him when he was a baby. His baby will be the sixth generation to lie in the cradle.

There was no real drama with the food this year, unless you count my meat thermometer breaking at the critical moment for testing the turkey and a nagging worry that it might not be done when I took it out of the oven.  The normal worry about the rolls, compounded by a recent failure with the last batch I made.  A little uncertainty about the dressing – did I add enough sage, or too much sage, or the right amount of celery and onion?  My mama never had a written down recipe for her dressing and I wish I had asked for more details about how much of everything she used.  I doubt she knew herself.   It’s one of those things you have to guess at.  Or as a meme I’ve read says, “Just keep adding stuff until the ghost of an ancestor says, that’s enough.”  My ancestors are not very reliable at helping in the kitchen so I’m mostly on my own.  But the turkey was done, a ten-pound breast is enough for twenty people when you also have ham, the dressing was pretty good, although I have to remember to buy a really large bowl to mix it in before next time.  My hint for the day is that the cover of a large cake carrier makes a pretty good mixing bowl in a pinch!

I bought paper plates with pretty Thanksgiving decorations on them, fully intending to use them this year.  But at the last minute, I gathered up the china and crystal and set it out.  It took all my mama’s and my great grandmother’s plates, all the heavy Fostoria glasses that were mine and my mama’s, and what seemed like every piece of silver in the house.  There is something gratifying about eating off the same plates my family has eaten from since before I was even born, and washing up is really not that big a chore when you have memories for company.  As I hand wash my great grandmother's fragile plates, I wondered how on earth it survived through the decades of use by a bunch of farm boys!  She was an intimidating woman, if my vague memory is correct - I guess they knew to be careful under her watchful eye. As I washed my grandmother’s ornate silver, I wondered why on earth I don’t use it all the time – what am I saving it for?  When she was alive, we used it every day, for all three meals.  Maybe I will leave it out of its wooden chest this time and enjoy it.

Along about dark, putting all reason aside, I made a plate of leftovers and ate by the fire.  I don’t know why people complain about leftover food at Thanksgiving – I think it tastes better when you’ve had a little time to relax after the hustle of the big meal.  The dogs had already enjoyed their plates of leftovers and were quiet and peaceful, even the one puppy still waiting to go home with his new family.  Leftover food, echoes of familiar laughter, leftover gratitude for a blessed life.  That’s the one leftover we could all use more of – giving thanks every day for the lives we enjoy.  For life itself, for the sunrise and sunset, for birdsong and the night sky, for music and paintings and good books to read.  For family and friends and the sharing of good times and the comfort in bad times.  Saying thank you every morning is a good way to start the day, and saying thank you every night is a perfect way to end the day.  You really don’t need the turkey to make it Thanksgiving!

 

When Time Stands Still

 

The ancient Greeks had it right.  Their language was much more precise than our language.  They had three words for love.  Because they knew that love is too big for just one word. And they had two words for time.  Chronos and Kairos.

Chronos is, of course, chronological time, measured by the inevitable movement of the clock.  In my younger days, it was measured by the sweep of the hands, relentlessly moving around the clock face and ticking off the numbers that measure our lives.  Sometimes the hands seem to move too fast, as when you have a deadline.  Sometimes the hands creep by.  I’ve spent an eternity during the long hours in a hospital chair, waiting for the end of an endless night.  Or waiting in a sort of limbo, wishing for news but dreading what you might hear.  The other kind of time, Kairos, is an entirely different matter. 

My first introduction to the concept of Kairos as a child was my reading of A Wrinkle in Time.  I didn’t understand exactly what the author meant about her concept of time, not intellectually at least.  But, like most children, I had an instinctive understanding of what she was trying to say, not as science but as a place in my soul.  I knew what it was to ride my horse for hours at a time, not conscious of the passage of time, but truly present in doing what I loved to do.  I immersed myself in books, entering another world and becoming a part of that world, only emerging when the last page was turned. 

Watch a child at play, really lost in the moment, and you will see what Kairos looks like.  Watch a musician play his instrument, eyes closed and the notes pouring out of his heart, or an artist, when his brush tells a story and time stands still.  At its best, writing happens in Kairos, when words spill out of your fingers faster than you can type and an hour seems like moments. In Kairos we become what God calls us to be, almost touching creation, catching a glimpse of the veil between here and heaven.

I have experienced Kairos sitting by a campfire under the summer stars, beside a rocky stream.  Tales of the fish we would catch, or those who got away, remembrances of camping trips past and listening in silence to frogs croaking and the splash of fish surfacing for a midnight snack.  Or taking an unknown path to a mysterious location, wondering all the time what lies just around the next bend.

Then there are unhurried meals with family and friends, sitting around a crowded table, when the clock has no meaning, and a lunch hour sometimes stretches into two.  Sometimes Kairos happens when you meet new friends, friends you recognize as kindred spirits, when idle conversation turns into hours of catching up on lives spent just waiting to meet in person.

I find myself noticing this concept of time more and more these days.  I sit on a mossy rock in my garden of wildflowers and time passes without notice.  I attend a three hour concert so special that I’m not sure I even took a breath until the end, when I wished we could start over at the beginning and do it again.  I remember a tribute show for John Prine, when 3,000 fans breathed together and sang along with hearts full of gratitude for the songs he left us.   I sat next to a man I had never seen in my life, but felt I knew.  “Are you crying?” he asked me a couple of times, when the lyrics were more than I could bear.  “Yes,” I said, and he just nodded.  Chronological time meant nothing that night, and strangers became friends.

 I experience Kairos on my front porch, swinging gently in the morning sun or in the lazy afternoon, when work becomes unimportant and even the birds fall silent. 

Maybe my favorite time on the porch is in the evening, watching dusk turn to dark, witnessing the moon peer over the trees and the stars wink out of the clouds.  The Milky Way spills across the night sky and the North Star holds its steady position, ready to show travelers the way home. The fireflies, like stars raining out of the skies, the voice of the owls and the quiet snorts from the horses in the field wipe away the cares of the day.  There is no Chronos time there. 

Several generations have enjoyed this porch – I wonder if they felt the same timelessness as I feel.  I think my mama did, even if she didn't express it in that way. 

And I know the kids she babysat did, because they still share memories with me about the times they spent on that porch.  And now their own children are coming to visit and sit on this porch.

 

Alice’s sister and her family, my cousins from across the country, came for a visit, and we spent an entire afternoon on the front porch, trading memories and talking idly about everything from movies to dogs to biscuits with butter and sugar to the dangers of artificial intelligence to how we are all related.  We watched the birds at the feeder, marveling at the size of the resident woodpecker, and wondering where the hummingbirds are today. We discussed the taste of wood sorrel, the price of eggs and the hazards of gathering eggs as children.  We talked about when to plant corn, what kind of tomatoes are best and how to make cracklings at hog killing time.  We petted the dogs, who understand that time is not important at all, unless it’s time for dinner.  I marveled at the behavior of my dogs toward my cousin’s husband, who is in frail health.  Sophie and Scout stationed themselves on either side of him, watching with quiet eyes and encouraging him with gentle nudges to stroke their heads and rub their ears.  We talked about my sign, which advertises Porch Therapy.  “I don’t do anything,” I told them.  “You just sit here and work out your own problems.”

My young cousin (not all that young now, to my amazement, but younger than me) played with dogs, disappeared occasionally to help Clay work on the lawnmower in the back yard, and helped me feed the horses.  Every now and then someone would mention that it was probably time to go, but no one made a move toward the car.  Before we knew it, it was 6:00 and Alice’s husband had called to see where they were.  “We’re sitting on the porch,” she told him.  And that’s all that needed to be said. We were in an enchanted place, experiencing Kairos.  It was a wonderful afternoon.