The Big Snow

By nightfall on Boxing Day the snow was really coming down. It swirled and blew all through the night, but the next morning dawned crisp and clear. The news reported 20 inches. On the narrow side streets, where bikes and parking meters stood neck-deep in white, it seemed like so much more. Some people brought out cross-country skies, many more their shovels. And the digging out began. Central Park was another country where little kids made snow angels and daredevil boys surfed down the park's snow-packed stairs. Meanwhile in midtown, hardy New Yorkers trudged to their workplaces as sidewalk vendors set up shop in the snow. While the blizzard was happening, I was mostly ensconced in my home, glad I didn't have to go anywhere but eventually feeling a little stir crazy. These were the scenes that greeted us when at last we ventured outside. That last image kind of reminds me of the Beatles' Abbey Road cover, but in the reverse.

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Andrew Burton/ Getty Images

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A. Strakey/ Flickr

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3 a.m.

It is late at night, 3 a.m. and I cannot sleep and I have this thought in my head, in my chest, circling without relief, there is a dragon inside me, there is a dragon inside me, and it howls like crying and burns ice cold, I cannot express it, I have no words, just the awful lonely pain, the longing to escape myself, I am too much with myself. But I can't write it all here. If I let my fears and imaginings find daylight they will ignite and consume me and those I love, and so I stitch myself together. Everyone else is sleeping. No one hears the dragon scream.

Elsewhere, the flares

We had a cozy Christmas inside our little bubble of an apartment, the four of us and one friend of my son's whose mother is away for the holidays, a young man who will be 21 in a month, who has slept on our couch for the past few nights and wrapped himself around our hearts with his cheerful spirit, his easy accommodation to whatever is, which may or may not be the way he is feeling inside, but it has been lovely having him here with us, all six-foot-nine of him stretched out on the long couch, under the gray plaid comforter, the life our family flowing easily around him. He and my son have been friends since they were 12 and 14, they met at camp, have spent many weeks together in the woods every summer, and they are as bonded as brothers. My son is a very loyal and loving friend, and he takes for granted that if he has given his allegiance, his family will, too, and we do.

My daughter and this gentle young man were at the kitchen counter last night, heads together as they worked out a solution to Einstein's famous quiz. Outside, the snow piled up, blowing furiously all through the day and night. We ate Christmas leftovers until, at nine in the evening, my husband and daughter decided to roast a chicken and bake potato wedges in rosemary and olive oil, and wonderful aromas filled the house. We dined at midnight then settled down to watch a whole new movie, since no one had to be up early the next morning.

I have often reflected on my son's gift for friendship. He is rock solid, generous, funny, kind. But he also chooses well; his friends give him back the same loyalty and love. I suspect sometimes that his closest friends are his soul group, that they have incarnated together many times before, and know each other at the core. His friends recognize and appreciate his constancy. They also understand his occasionally prickly and contrary nature, they shrug when he gets like that, they laugh and say, "Oh, that's how he is sometimes," and soon my son comes out of it, because no one is following him to his cranky country, they're letting him blow of steam there in safety and peace, and I could learn a thing or two from his friends.

We did venture out into the snow to check on my aunt, to bring her Christmas gifts and cookies and bites of food, but mostly we stayed cocooned in our bubble, puttering and cooking and working out puzzles and drifting away to different corners of the house and coming back together to talk and laugh and cook some more and watch movies and marvel at the snow piling up and up outside. My son, who ran to the store for his dad and sister, remarked this was more snow than he has ever seen in the city. And then we all told snow stories. It was all so stream of consciousness.

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But somewhere out there beyond the snow, I discerned the flares. Other people were having a very different kind of Christmas. One of my cousins was trying to steady her children for their parents' looming divorce, and her move this week from the family home. One of my nieces, whose wedding I was to attend in Jamaica next month, called to say the ceremony had been canceled, the reasons were personal and would not be discussed. She sounded strong, much stronger than her mother, whose heart is breaking for her, and my mother, who my brother noted takes on everyone's aches as if they are her own. My family in Jamaica was a little shaky this Christmas, pasting on a brave smile and pushing forward. My husband and his siblings were dealing with another holiday without their beloved mother, and the lonely silences that have developed in her absence. And in Virginia, my friend Tamara was sitting with her mother and sister at her dad's bedside, keeping the final vigil. She posted updates on Facebook that were full of sorrow and wonder and tenderness, a painfully exquisite record of the end of her father's life.

"He is speaking the most beautiful language that we cannot understand with his familiar gestures and facial expressions. It sounds like something ancient."

"We sit, one on each side, and listen. Just listen. It is ceremony. We are honoring and honored. Every moment shimmers."

I read her posts and wept for her, and ineptly wrote her my love and prayers. And then on Christmas day the status updates changed.

"Everywhere I look I see something he touched, made, fixed, loved. Daddy. I am never going to stop missing my Daddy."

And I realized he was gone.

Tamara, my beloved friend, I think you will understand my desire to repost your words here. I want to remember them, and to keep this record of the breathtaking way in which your shared your father's last moments on this earth with those of us who love you. Through your stories over the years, we had come to know the deeply good man who was your father. Such fathers must be held up to the world and remembered always. I send you love, dear Tamara, though I have no words to make your grief any less. How could we not grieve the loss of such a man as your father? 

I am holding you now. I hope you can feel it somehow.

Love is all

Christmas eve, and twelve of the clock. 

Now they are all on their knees.

—Thomas Hardy

Christmas Boxes

When I was growing up, our family went to midnight carol service every Christmas eve. My brother and I sat through the singing full of anticipation, because as soon as we got home, we would be allowed to open a single present before bed as our parents drank warm egg nog spiked with brandy and watched us with an amused indulgence I only understood after I had children.

This Christmas eve will not find us in church, though our minister is coming by our home this morning so that my husband, who is on the vestry, can co-sign some checks. The business of the world presses on. Later we will go to the store and lay in groceries, and my husband will cook a hearty soup that we will eat in bread bowls and serve to the friends of my children who are camped out in our living room. I love having them here, large boys, young men really, draped over my living room furniture watching a nightly Avatar marathon, they are up to the fire nation now, as giggling girls run down the hallway in a flurry of chatter and teenage heels and squeals. 

We put up a small table-top tree this year, thinking we might be elsewhere for the holidays. The presents climb in small towers around its branches. Boxes arrive at the door each day, gifts from cousins in other cities who are more organized. Our gifts to them will arrive after Christmas. They don't mind. They have come to enjoy the epilogue of presents arriving after all the brightly-colored wrapping paper has been cleared away. One last sweet echo of Christmas morning. 

Yesterday, my daughter made shortbread jam cookies, red velvet whoopie pies and chocolate caramel crumble and packed them in boxes to give as gifts. One of her friends came over to help her, a young man in her class with whom she shares a comedic repartee. For five hours they sifted and mixed and tested and tasted, finally laying out trays of treats for boxing. My daughter quickly assembled the first box for her friend, who was pushing up against the hour that he was expected home. My son and his best friend who is like my other son, who lives as much in our home as his own, lounged on the living room couches, impatient to sample the goods. My daughter made them wait until I got home from work. I was the first sampler and oh, it was good. Mouths full, the rest of the family made noises that expressed their agreement.

And then I helped my girl fill the boxes and tie red bows around them. Last night, she went out to dinner with her five closest friends, carrying a ribbon-tied box of Christmas treats for each one. They were meeting at a neighborhood diner, nothing fancy, though you couldn't have told from the way they got all gussied up. Oh, to be sixteen and seventeen. The boys, joined by another of their friends, went to a midnight Imax-3D showing of the movie Tron. Back home, my husband and I lay side by side in bed, chatting about everything, contented.

Antigua I Love

View from Shirley Heights, Antigua 

When I was twelve years old, I dreamed my husband's face clear as daylight, standing in this place. In the dream I was standing next to him on top of this hill that I didn't yet recognize. Sea breezes whipped our clothes around us, and I looked into his eyes that in the dream were dancing, and I felt at home. I didn't meet him in the flesh for another fourteen years.

Blue Waters, Antigua

Blue Waters is where my parents lived when they moved to Antigua. My father had retired from the courts in Jamaica and taken a post-retirement position in Antigua. They stayed just long enough for me to meet my husband, then they moved to St. Lucia, where my father had been promoted, and where my mother still maintains their home.

Detail of St. John's Cathedral, Antigua  

I first saw the man I would later marry in this Cathedral. I was with my parents at midnight carol service on Christmas eve, just hours after flying in from New York. The man who was not yet my husband and his brother were walking up to the altar for communion, two handsome, stalwart pillars on either side of their elegant prayerful mother. The air around them was full of incense, and the Christmas lights made colorful halos in the smoke. I remember really noticing my husband that night. A year later we had met and were falling in love, and I introduced my parents to his beautiful mother after Christmas morning service at this church. Our parents loved this Cathedral and could be found in its pews every Sunday. My brother-in-law is now patiently and with great reverence and purpose working on the restoration of this centuries-old, memory-soaked building.

(Photos by Kevin Milz)

Home for the holiday

So it turns out we will not be going to Antigua for the holidays after all, done in by air fares the price of college tuition, and that's before accommodations. Gone are the days when we just stayed in the home my husband grew up in. All the rooms there are occupied, so we four planned to rent a little cottage on the beach, were really looking forward to it, but somehow couldn't click the button that said buy, couldn't afford to click that button, no matter how hard we wished it, no matter how much my husband longed on this second Christmas without his mother to string colored lights on his dad's gallery and bake him a Christmas ham and say, look Pops, how your grandchildren are growing like small trees, sturdy and branching up and out into the world.

Some of my husband's extended family will be gathering in Antigua for the holidays, and we wanted to be there, to see people we hadn't seen in years, North Carolina in the house, and Canada and Barbados too, and I had also quietly hoped for reconciliations among the estranged, or at least the long silent, I thought if we could look into each others faces the love would be so clear, and everything hard would become soft again, and we would be healed. She would smile down on us, and we would all begin anew.

Instead we will be right here in New York City, bundled against the cold, dreaming of long ago Christmases that were perfect in their way. But we will be together, the four of us, and we will make this Christmas perfect in its way.

Winterberry holly on the High Line,  New York City

Untroubled

The college kids are home, light of heart now that finals are done. My son and my niece tumbled through my front door at 7 a.m., suitcases, jackets, knapsacks in tow. Shoes kicked off, hoodies abandoned, they found their preferred covers, curled up on their preferred sofas and went right to sleep. You can see they feel free, that their sleep is untroubled by still have to, didn't get to, forgot to do. It makes me feel free and untroubled too.

And then I remember. Is this really the last Saturday before Christmas? My niece flies home to Jamaica tomorrow and I still have to get gifts to send with her. But for a few delicious moments this morning I'm gazing at the sleeping heads of my children, taking it slow.

What Is

This corner of my house was speaking to me today. We were such children, what did we know? Twenty-five years later I know that I would do it all again.

Still the one

It was freezing cold, but I have a big fluffy green coat that wraps me like a blanket and makes me equal to anything the winter can dream up.

Just ask my husband.