A few months after Kori moved more than a thousand miles southwest, I learned algebra with my sixteen year old traveling babysitter (brother of a fellow skater), all the way to her new house, above clickety-clack, clickety-clack, one whole night and day.
One night, after dinner, we drove past luminarias, one after another for miles, resting on red stucco. We sang Away in a Manger, words never heard before. Sweetness gave me tears. We sang when I asked, please, I need to hear our voices rise again.
A tree I expected, gifts too, piled beneath. Each day before Christmas morning we wandered store aisles, seeking perfect generosity. I could not have known there would be so many on the awaited morning, or how they would appear to be bathed in magic.
Each night, a new adventure. Taco eating contest, singing along magic lights, skating on Los Alamos. I didn't see the moon that trip, tall as a ten story, sitting at the end of their block, but now I know, if I had looked at just the right moment, I would see an enormous ball of light, one I might have walked to.
Children play wild. Most memories fade, grow hazy on the edges, file themselves deep in time gone. I slept in my friend's room, ate with her family, won the taco eating contest, raced Kori in our scuffed white skates, jumping and spinning with floppy arms. Only a picture of luminarias, Jesus without a bed, my sadness for Him, my adoration of our mingled voices telling so two thousand years later, and waking to presents washed in a ray of dawn, many more than I remembered from the night before, my name written over and over beneath those pine needles, remain outlined in their reality.
Going home two weeks later, clickety-clack, with my first companions eighteen year old sister. Up all night in the dining car with a table full of barely adults. Intellectual debate for the first time, like only can happen with those on the brink, ready to tip out of childhood. I kept up, drinking in easy laughter as it gave way again and again to weighty matters, but always back to joy. We returned to our seat long after dawn.
Posted by heidi at December 17, 2010 08:47 PM