Coffee’s hot — the room isn’t.
The wood stove is trying, the softwood already well alight, the kindling done its eager short-lived flare and gone, the birch settling in for the long haul.
The room is the way it always is when you open the house in winter — cold, colder, in fact, than the outdoors. Outside, where the wind is teasing at the spruce, the tops of the trees moving back and forth in unison while the lower branches bounce discordant.
A scrim of snow in the air, a thin cover on the ground.
I know that later, the house across and down the road will be ablaze with Christmas lights in the jet black night, crouched down in its little dell, the yard a circle of orange thrown down from the single high streetlight. I wonder, who for? There’s no one on this road most nights, most houses dark, only that handful of bright lights blaring out into the black.
I can still see my breath in the kitchen.
Later, I know, the room will be full of the close, particular heat of wood stoves, a kind of heat that deserves its own word.
I am here for the “too lates” of Christmas — too late to really do any more, too late to change things, too late to do anything but soak up that fine thin line that is the season to me.
I wait for it. Every year. I fear it won’t arrive, the way you stand at an airport or in a train station and fear the person you’re expecting won't be on the train or plane after all. It is a particularly hollow kind of apprehension, yet also a delicious doubt.
Especially when what you’re waiting for hasn’t happened recently enough for you to fully or completely remember it — for example, what if they get off the train and you don’t even recognize them? What if their face isn’t right? What if you walk right by each other and continue on your way, each of you sure the other is the one who has changed their mind?
Later, I know, the room will be full of the close, particular heat of wood stoves, a kind of heat that deserves its own word.
What if Christmas isn’t the thing you remember, what if it is all so tangled up in its own mythology that what you’re waiting for is actually the fictional construction, a fictional expectation, of things gathered from movies and books and advertising?
The room warms. Outside, the weather cycles through rushes of fat, heavy snowflakes and then the clattered tapping patterns of ice pellets. Everyone’s out walking, in different directions. Adult children who haven’t seen each other in years are convening by the ocean, finding their footing on the cliff and with each other. At least one walker has headed inland, braving careless moose hunters but sheltered from the wind as the sky alternates between piled stacks of grey cloud, backlit along the edges with bright yellow sun, and short, intense snow.
In a break from the wind, I watch single snowflakes fall straight, straight down from the sky, settling on to the grass that pokes up from the older snow.
I am.
I think about that regularly, knowing now with a certainty that I didn’t when I was younger that it definitely includes, at some tangible point, a time when I am not.
But right now, I am. Seated at a narrow kitchen table, sweat-shirted, slippered, still cold, able now to forgive trespasses that, years ago, would have been rallying cries. Corners knocked off, sharp places, smoothed.
Old enough to doubt all things, young enough to be delighted when they actually arrive. Waiting right there at the sharp street corner between patient and resigned.
For this.
I find it finally, distilled down to something small and far more precise, more intense and contained, than the crowd and rush and flare of childhood Christmas. Where sheer wonder used to live, there’s now something more like the distinct and treasured hand-feel of holding the handle of a hatchet you’ve owned for years.
The snow ebbs and falls, obeying its own imperatives.
But I find it.
I hope you do, too.
Russell Wangersky’s column appears in SaltWire publications across Atlantic Canada. He can be reached at [email protected] — Twitter: @wangersky
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