Tag Archives: travel

Houses in Detroit

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This entry should be entirely in pictures, but instead, it is entirely in words. I’m sorry. I’ve failed you. Words are all I have.

On Monday, while making the long drive back from Minnesota, my parents and I stopped and stayed the night with my mom’s younger brother in Detroit. Last summer he bought a house there in a neighborhood called La Salle Gardens. It’s a two story, four-bedroom Tudor with a big, open attic, and stained glass in the dining room, and a beautiful carved bannister on the stairs, and a basement that has two bathrooms, a bar, and pool table which maybe used to be a speakeasy. He paid $20,000 for it.

I don’t know a lot about Detroit. I’m very willing to admit that I haven’t really done my research. I know that they make cars there, and that there were race riots in the sixties, and then everything got dangerous and over a million people left (I don’t know which happened first) and now everyone in the country seems to feel scared and sad and bitter about Detroit. And I know that before my uncle even closed the sale of his house, someone came in and stole all the copper pipes.

At some indeterminate point during my freshman year of college, when, as a dorm dweller, I was in the throes of a bit of a house-obsession, I had stumbled across this website: http://www.100abandonedhouses.com/. What the photographer had captured was cold and crumbling and beautiful and lonely. I returned over and over to stare at the houses, all of which seemed to whisper, in their hundred different voices, I once was.

And then, five years later, on Monday, there I was in Detroit. We were there for less than twenty hours, some of which necessarily involved sleeping, but we walked and we drove and we walked again, and I saw those houses. In my uncle’s neighborhood, children played in the street, ramming into one another happily with their bikes, older siblings bossing and cajoling the younger ones. Houses in good repair and houses still clearly stuck in tough times sat next to houses marked for demolition, and houses with their whole back ends fallen in which were probably still years from the top of the city’s demo list. My dad said the neighborhoods were like a mouth full of broken teeth.

We walked and I stared at the houses. I know so little about architecture that I don’t have the vocabulary to describe what I loved about them. (So much for “words are all I have.”) Most of them were big, some of them huge. Every window and door seemed to be broken or boarded or barred. Some had box air conditioners spilling out of them. There were pillars and many-paned glass windows, and yards full of weeds that looked older than me, and generous front stoops, and turrets with overgrown trees leaning into them, and sloping slate roofs, and stone facades with bullet wounds, and gingerbread molding, and gables that sagged like sleeping eyes, and intricate brickwork, and worn steps adorned with enormous concrete fleurs-de-lis and lions, brought in to urge tired houses on to former glory. We walked and we looked and every time my mom said, “Oh, it’s so sad,” I found myself saying, “Oh, it’s so pretty.”

People who saw us from their porches or their cars looked and waved at the gawking white people with friendly confusion, like we were desert animals wandered into the tundra. One lady named Addie Tyson, age ninety-one, stopped us and talked almost non-stop for twenty minutes, mostly about how proud she was to live in the house she lived in, and then wanted to give me a hug, largely, I think, motivated by her surprise that I was twenty-four, and not fifteen, like she had thought. We walked on and saw several pit bulls, one happily roaming free.

Even before this very brief visit I had talked about my fascination with Detroit and the strange appeal the shattered houses held for me, but I am not built to be an urban homesteader. I am white and single and female, and while I know this doesn’t entirely preclude me, the fact that I am easily frightened, less than usually resourceful, and more than usually uncomfortable even in the safest of cities probably does. Detroit is dangerous. It is no longer the murder capital of the United States (Hooray, Chicago!), but there is still a bullet hole in one of my uncle’s front windows. Many other houses have them too. And though with a few more years of teaching I could probably afford to buy a house there out-of-pocket, the work to be done in most of them is enormous. A few of the doors in my uncle’s house are salvaged from other places. And when we left on Monday, there were holes in the living room ceiling and the upstairs bathroom floor, all on the docket to be repaired in the coming weeks.

But even if I don’t go to Detroit, there is something to be learned. (There is always something to be learned.) There is something that Kevin Bauman’s 100 Abandoned Houses project did not capture, or at least which I could not capture from it. His photos show individual houses, alone in their desolation. But when I stood in front of those houses and rode down rows of them, they cast a different spell on me. They sat all pressed up against one another in their various architectural styles and their levels of decay and repair, and they reminded me of people. I don’t just mean that as a some lightweight personification. I know houses don’t have immortal souls, but they reminded me of you and me and him and her all added on next to one another, side by side in our memories and our oddities and our destruction and our hope and our waiting.

Monday evening, as we drove around neighborhoods full of slightly-dilapidated mansions and long-abandoned houses with trees grown up through them, my dad marveled at such devastation existing so close to such wealth. But I looked into their eyes and I could not be surprised. Those houses were tired and wounded, some with their guts ripped out. Made of dust, they looked ready for resurrection.

The Sun

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I’m writing because it’s March 31st, I haven’t written since February, and I don’t think I’ve ever missed a month. I don’t have much to say, though. It’s spring break, I just got back from a college visit with my brother, and all I can think of is how many things there are to do before I go back to school on Monday. It’s actually not that long of a list, but my foul mood is managing to expand the font size.

But on our early flight back from Houston this morning I watched the sun rise. A blade of orange light bisected the darkness. Above it, the clouds made mountains and then gold faded into the softest blue. That blue got bigger and brighter and bigger and warmer until, quite suddenly, the clear, white sun came up. Even when I closed my eyes it burned through my eyelids and lit the world.

It’s March 31st and I watched the sun rise.

Reading, Writing, and Living

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I finished two books over Thanksgiving break. One of them I started way back in August, but that’s neither here nor there. Both were strongly recommended to me by teacher-friends and roughly the size of bricks: East of Eden and A Prayer for Owen Meany.

I finished the first on the three-and-a-half hour drive from a Minneapolis airport hotel up to my uncle’s camp, way north of Duluth. Although there were parts that made me feel cold and unsure, the last quarter of that book made me warm. It’s a story about overcoming evil, but wonderful and frightening: it’s about overcoming evil within ourselves, about the ultimate powerlessness of sin in the face of mercy. So I liked that.

And then, three days later, on the drive back down to the airport, I finished Owen Meany. Or rather, I meant to, but the lead up to the final scene that I knew was coming got me more and more worked up and, although I never get car-sick, I began to feel nauseated and laid the book down on my lap. I sat crushed in the backseat of the little rental car with my aunt and my brother and looked out the window at Minnesota’s shades of white and grey and wondered when reading had become such a harrowing experience.

When I was a kid, reading was like breathing–I did it inside, outside, on my bed, on the couch, on the floor, in the bathroom, under the table. But even as a child I knew there was a limit, that there was such a thing as too much. Once, when I was probably nine or ten, I read four books in one day, and each time my mother or some other demanding force pulled me to the surface, I came up for air snarling and unhappy. I was so deeply immersed that the world of my books seemed more real than the world around me. From that day on, I judiciously set myself a “no more than three books a day” rule (which now, as an adult with access to Netflix, I have no trouble sticking to.)

But the way I felt last Monday, driving to the airport with Owen Meany in my lap, reminded me of that four-book day. I knew how the story was going to end–each detail of the last scene was painstakingly, loudly foreshadowed and even explained. But I was drowning in it. Eventually we got to the airport, and before even going through security, I bought a bottle of orange juice, sat down, and read the last fifteen pages or so, through the ending that I had been both anticipating and dreading. My stomach still felt queasy. “You don’t read enough.” I told myself over and over. “You’re just not used to this kind of emotional involvement anymore.” The TSA officer who checked my boarding pass told me to smile, and I gripped the novel through my purse, wanting to slam it into his face, notify him of what I was experiencing.

Finally, a few hours later, just before landing in Midway on a very crowded plane, I wrote a poem. I have been writing one every Monday for the last few months, so I figured that though I still felt awful and also unsure of where the barf bags were, I would go ahead and get it done. It began as a poem telling God what it was that I needed at this dreadfully harrowing emotional moment in my life and then, a brief two stanzas later, it ended with him telling me that he already knew. Oh. He knew.

I put my notebook away and felt warm and comforted and, for the first time all day, hungry. Writing gave me instant relief. Input and output: the novel had run right through me, been let out at the end by my poem, and I was clean and new, like a glass pipette.

I’ve been thinking about all that this week, coming up with morals and conclusions about the ultimate purpose of the story-telling and the written word and self-expression, both our own and other people’s. But I keep getting stumped on one thing: what about living? What about real experience? What about each second that ticks and each movement of our hands that never gets recorded or even remembered, but still is the thing which shapes us most intently, wears the grooves into our souls?

That Friday, while helping my mom with our belated Thanksgiving dinner, I sat at the counter in my aunt’s kitchen making rolls. I tasted a corner of the dough, and the soft tang of the yeast brought me an overwhelming sense of missing. The recipe is a family friend’s, passed down by my grandma, but the person those rolls made me miss was my sister far away in London. She is the one to make them every year in our house, to turn up the music in the kitchen, to roll them out, to crowd them in that pan, to pack away the leftovers, to eat and eat them for days after the holiday. I was doing a shoddy, lumpy job compared to her.

Later that evening, we sat in the living and sang Thanksgiving hymns (which several family members claimed to know very few of) and I again thought of Mary, who knows all the words, all the notes on piano, who loves to sing along, and loud. I slipped out of my seat, sat halfway down the basement stairs and cried.

In the actual living of our lives, feelings of missing and longing and love and assurance and doubt rope their way around our hearts and are not dealt with by the writing of one poem, or by the writing of twenty, I would guess. But he knows, God already knows. And he “keeps us with repining restlessness.”

Our hearts are restless till they rest in You.

Three Memories for the Mid-Way Point

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My junior year of high school we took U.S. History. One day at lunch, part-way through the year, I found a classmate crying in the hallway. She told me she had failed the last few history tests and she was too intimidated to ask the teacher and she was just so, so lost. We were not particularly friends, but I politely offered to help and I remember being surprised when she was eager to take me up on it. So she came over a couple nights later and we sat at my dining room table and ate brownies and talked about tariffs. After we got our next test back, she wrote me a profusely sweet little note, “ALICE! Thank you so, so much for helping me! I got an 84!” An 84, I thought, That’s good? I would hate an 84. And every time I remember that I thought that, I am ashamed. I want to go back and grab my sixteen-year-old self by the lapels of her worn-out uniform sweater and shake her. I want to tell her that in six years’ time she will not remember a single one of her own silly test grades but she will remember that beautiful, hard-won B-. She will remember the smiley-faces that were drawn all over that note, and she will be humbled by them.

This Christmas my family flew up to Minnesota, and en route we had what became an eight-hour layover in the Atlanta airport. We sat and we sat and I watched the people. There were a lot of servicemen and women–lots of Marines especially–some hurrying to catch a flight and some just waiting. As one after another went by and I hoped for each one that he was going home, I realized that though the women in uniform looked like women, the men mostly looked like boys. I did the math in my head, and realized that most of them were probably closer in age to my students than they were to me. Then they looked very young indeed. In the midst of all of that sitting and watching, I wrote this in my prayer journal, about my students: “I must keep repeating my mantra from earlier in the year, before I cared about them so much: You love them far more than I ever will and You do it better. There is nothing I can break down that You cannot build back up and stronger. I will trust in Your love for them.”

My sophomore year of college was my hardest. Everything looked very grey to me and I felt grainy and sad. If you have been reading this blog long enough you may remember. That March, at the tail end of my spring break, my mom and George came up to visit me. I remember running out into the ice and snow to meet them when the car pulled up. My mom got out to hug me, and then she said, “Oh, I brought you something.” She leaned into the car and turned back around holding a mason jar full of bright yellow daffodils from home. Just last night I remembered all this rather suddenly and for reasons I still cannot articulate, I cried while remembering. The snow, and the slate-colored sky, and the weary brick of my dorm building, and then my mother’s familiar hands, holding daffodils which she had carried over nearly five hundred miles of highway.

Fairy Lights

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Billy and Ashley got married this weekend. It was a sweet haphazard wedding, we ate lots of pie, Ashley forgot to throw the bouquet, I hugged cousins, and neither of my grandparents fell on the ice that coated northern Minnesota, so really the whole thing was a roaring success.

Last night my mom and I had a connecting flight from Chicago coming home. Now, I am not a city person. Three days has always been more than enough for me, and on top of that there is a nagging voice in my head which tells me I should love nature best. You know, #creation and all that. But we had a long, clear descent into Chicago at about seven-thirty their time. Seven-thirty when everyone is home and eating dinner and doing homework and watching TV and making plans and finishing laundry. Seven-thirty when all the lights are on, and dim little headlights reach out in front of sojourning cars, and streetlights duck behind trees and back out again as you pass ten thousand feet above them. There are patterns in the street plans, you know; they wind and gloam, stretching themselves into the darkness. Floodlights cast their own drops of gold, and downtown blocks form complex, glittering mountains that wink and beckon. And it is all so very vast. Forgive me if I ignore that preachy voice in my head, and tell you that is the view I love the best. I could be one of those people who live in a suspended glass box for weeks on end, just so long as mine was particularly high.

I don’t have any real metaphor to draw. I’ll leave that up to you if you’re so inclined. I’m just coming to terms with the fact that my imagination is usually wrong, because often Reality won’t fit inside of it at all. So I simply want to tell you how much I love heights and fairy lights and grandeur and distance, things endowed with impossible grace.

Distance

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This weekend I went home for fall break. Almost five hundred miles, but really only eight hours. Eight hours is close. Distance makes most sense to me in terms of time. They are cousins, you see.

My grandparents’ house in Missouri, for example, is two days away, and that’s as close as Wednesday, but then again, with a plane, it’s as close as tonight.

A mile is short when I drive it and long when I run it and perfect when I walk it, but an hour is always the same. So I prefer the hour.

Distance is usually time to me, but time is often not distance. I mean that nothing, no part of life, seems far to me right now. I feel as if I stand dead center.

When I was one my daddy built a swing on the big tree in our backyard.

When I was two my mama earned her doctorate.

When I was three my friend Danny would let me have his pudding cup at snack time.

When I was four my mom would put my hair up in little fountains on top of my head.

When I was five I prayed for a little brother every night.

When I was six I got one.

When I was seven I showed off to my friends by pouring chocolate milk on my pizza at lunchtime.

When I was eight Mary and I flew to California alone and the stewardess let me pass out peanuts to all the passengers in my cabin.

When I was nine Karen and I made peanut butter fudge by candle light on a snow day.

When I was ten I learned to knit.

When I was eleven I was in such a foul mood when we got to the Grand Canyon that my mother had to order me out of the car.

When I was twelve I was a flower girl for the first and last time.

When I was thirteen I stopped hating boys.

When I was fourteen Noah and I made up my imaginary big brother, Richard.

When I was fifteen I thought I was in love.

When I was sixteen I clocked a friend in the nose one night on a golf course, but she forgave me.

When I was seventeen my grammy died and the tree with the swing fell and I cried myself to sleep.

When I was eighteen I wrote a poem.

When I was nineteen my grandma called to ask how I did the green beans that one time.

And now I am twenty, and none of these things seem distant. Forty, when I will be greying, does not seem too far, and neither does eighty-three, when I plan on being quite white.

Before dinner just now I went and sat in the prayer room and read over the journal there, whose entries date back to before I ever came here. But those people, those friends, those interceding brothers and sisters seem very close indeed. I am intended to feel that way, I think, because they are close—their ink, my hands, our cries to the same living God.

One thing seems far, though. There is a wooden cross in the prayer room. People have laid their burdens upon it. They have written their fears and sins and trespasses on notecards and nailed them to the tree, with a small hammer that lies on the floor. Purple sharpie on the stipes praises Christ for freedom, for distance from sin.

“As far as the east is from the west, so far has He removed our transgressions from us.”(Psalm 103:12)

From east to west—why, whenever you get to one the other is still just as far away as it was to begin with. It can’t be done. They’re hours, days, eternities apart, a miraculously impossible distance.

Adventure is out there!

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I started planning this entry on I-40 East coming home from Nashville. That has been my nice surprise of the month: I got to spend this past week in Missouri at my grandparents’, which you will have heard about in entries like this one and especially this one.

I didn’t bring my little computer at all and so was basically sans internet and mostly sans phone for over a week. I sat in the Raleigh airport a week ago Friday waiting for my flight and my head was spinning. I had just finished powering through season two of Mad Men at such a rate that sitting there I kept thinking every man I saw was Don Draper. Not that North Carolina boys are a bad-looking lot, but my, my, Alice, let’s not get carried away. My brain was fairly addled, and I felt disembodied. I felt as if I was no longer quite in possession of a self.

So here’s what I did all week: I read Tolkien, I washed a few windows, and I worked on a story. I had one white night, I watched one Jimmy Stewart movie, and I cooked some beans. I cleaned my grandma’s cabinets and went to Walmart only twice. One lovely afternoon I floated in the pool with a book and a milkshake from Tastee Treat.

I woke up a little, I think. It was a slow waking. I did not notice that I felt particularly different. Perhaps I was simply spending less time noticing myself and more time noticing the breeze on the dam of an afternoon, how many pages I had managed to fill in my little notebook, and marvelous quotes from the Hobbit to copy into it, though what I am writing is not at all a conventional adventure story. All hearty things for a kid in my condition—nothing like a computer screen to make you dwindle.

Then on Friday evening I sat in my aunt and uncle’s house watching the opening ceremonies and at the soaring shots of the countryside and the sound of the children’s choirs, I felt a near-forgotten longing. By the time all those Mary Poppinses floated down to vanquish Voldemort I had nearly lost my head.

I wanted to go. Karen and I had planned since we were sixteen to go to the 2012 Olympics. We were supposed to be there! What was I doing watching it from the couch? At the very least I was supposed to be headed there to study abroad this year. Off to visit the dear homeland of the Pevensies, the Bastables, the Mennyms, Pongo and Lady, the BFG and every other dear friend. (There is no faster way to my heart than British children’s literature.)

And thus it was that without warning I found myself saying to my mom in the car yesterday: “What if I got a job in England next summer?” Because, of course, I need money, (even at the end of this summer, I’m still scrambling for work,) but maybe I can quietly trick my scared little self into an adventure, if I make the arrangements fast, before myself notices.

I have often felt frightened and trapped and every miserable thing for the last year or so, but in the words of the indomitable Bilbo Baggins when he is trapped in a dark tunnel, lost from his friends and pursued by narsty, narsty goblins:

“Go back? No good at all! Go sideways? Impossible! Go forward? Only thing to do! On we go!”

He does not even think of standing still.

In Other News

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I haven’t written in a long time. Sorry about that. There hasn’t been a lack of material, just more of a lack in interest in said material. But I’m gonna muster up some interest, okay? Here goes.

– I got into the Raleigh airport at eleven p.m. and three of my very best friends picked me up and we went to Waffle House, acted obnoxious, and gave the nice waitress a large tip consisting mostly of change.

-My family had a staycation (Hooray, Mom!) which included a visit to Blandwood  Mansion (which I didn’t know existed), a trip to the art museum in Raleigh (where the Rodin was lovely), a voyage to Staunton to see the ASC (The Tempest was wonderful-wonderful), and a drive up to Hanging Rock (where I discovered that sometime in the last ten years I have become a very bad hiker. Awful, actually.)

-I have gone on four runs,  and now own my first-ever sports bra and real running shoes. I have yet to make it a half mile without stopping to die and walk.

-I am addicted to Hulu. Arrested Development, The Glee Project, How I Met Your Mother, Merlin, Project Runway… It really needs to end.

-Last week I had a little Tres Amigas reunion at the lake with Kinsley and Ruth. We watched some weird movies, ate pizza from the grill, and had a mysterious (but casualty-free) accident while tubing. Just like old times.

–Downton Abbey is lovely. Go watch it.

-Mary and I (and Karen [not Hannah]) painted our bedroom, which desparately needed it. I had been subjecting the walls to duct tape for years. It is now ballerina pink and looks like a hotel room. I kind of love it…

-I found out the names of my freshman little sisters, sent them an exuberant email, friended them on facebook, and burnt my fingers making them the best welcome posters ever.

-Everybody got engaged. (And by everybody I mean Beth and Tim, Hannah and Nathan, and Alyssa and John. ) Weddings! Huzzah! In other life-changing news, Emily and Casey will very soon have their new boys home from Ethiopia. Huzzah again!

-Additional highlights of being home have included finally seeing Harry Potter with Abby, making very oily Ravioli with Karen, buying an excellent leather skirt from Goodwill with Hannah, and discovering a diary of a long ago trip to Grandma’s with Mary. Also, that night Hannah, Karen, Patrick and I went to Walmart and put name tags on everything. That was good, too.

On Friday I go back to school. Between now and then I will snap out of myself. I will go see The Help with Annie, I will visit Mrs. Liebmann, I will look up fall fashion and get excited,  I will pack, I will plan, I will smile, I will get of bed the moment I wake up. In a week, I will be hugging so many people so much. It’s gonna feel good.

Places

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Dodie Smith’s I Capture the Castle begins with the wonderful declaration, “I write to you from the kitchen sink.” Unfortunately, I only write to you from a very crowded backseat in a very crowded car. Someday I’ll find myself a big old kitchen sink, and climb in.

Really, there are lots of places from which I’d love to write you. There are those of the kitchen sink variety, places I suppose any imaginative person could think of: a window seat, a fireside, a roof full of chimneys, a balcony, an attic. Then there are the places particular to me: the freshly clean breezeway at my grandparents’ house that has Charity and me bursting with pride, the old cemetery across the highway, or the dam at the top of the lake, home to Poopsie’s Greatest Achievement and the world’s most delicious breezes.

Finally, there are the dream places, the places which, as of yet, I only love in fantasy. First there is New England. I’ve never been farther north than New York, so a little back sector of my mind is determined to walk cobblestones in Boston. I’ve been to almost every other part of my country, I suppose because New England is not on the way to anywhere (except perhaps Prince Edward Island—now, that’s a place to write from!) and most of the states I’ve been through have been on the way to family and holiday. But if New England is on the way to itself, then I suppose it must be worth seeing. Right, Liesel?

Next is Hay-on-Wye in Wales, the town with the most used bookstores in the world. I think my very first banner on this blog was a picture of the bookshelves which line the streets: Hardbacks, 50 pence and Paperbacks, 30 pence. In other words, heaven. Then, of course, I’ve just finished Wuthering Heights, and it’s such a wonderfully novelish novel. Though I was really quite pleased to see Catherine and Heathcliff fall dead, it made me want to wander the moors, stand in the wind, have my hair properly wuthered, and above all, write.  There is also Venice. Since reading Cornelia Funke’s The Thief Lord early in high school, I airily disregard all complaints of its stench and dirt, and instead concentrate staunchly on gold lions, arched bridges, and meeting my dear friend Scipio. Actually, my mother told me if I got a full ride to college she would take me, but obviously that didn’t work out. Sorry, Mom. Someday.

The place which trumps all, though, is mine. I am currently in the throes of a mild-to-severe case of house fever. I look them up online and plan paint, and built-in bookshelves, and secret passageways. It must be big and old and storied. It must have wood floors and stairs that creak. It must have its own peculiar smell (but not too peculiar.) Eventually, it must have the perfect bathroom. Round and domed with a huge, claw-foot tub and sunny windows high in the walls. There will be a fireplace and a big, wide towel rack, and piles and piles of books. (I suppose there’ll be a toilet and sink, too, behind a screen somewhere.) Oh, and probably a daybed and lots of large, ticking clocks. And perhaps a chandelier. That’s my bathroom. A Room of My Own.  A room from which to write you.

Cousins, California, and Christmas itself…

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Merry Christmas, Happy New Year, Hello. In case you were wondering, exams went well, except for one. Then after many hugs, and fending off the last wisps of stress, I boarded a plane to Iowa. Of course, I do not live in Iowa, but my family was there already with my Mom’s side at the Wasserbahn Water Park. (What a place!) Thus began my vacation of lots-of-people-for-not-long-enough. I did see my cousins, of course, and it was a good time. Since United didn’t get my bag to me on time, we had an adventure to some nearby outlets to buy me $70 worth of clothes for which I will be reimbursed. There was also an extremely satisfactory Secret Santa, a rendition of “The Twelve Days of Christmas” which we found so entertaining that it is posted on Facebook, lots of Uno and Telephone Pictionary, and much cousin bonding on the couch in the hospitality room which was also Uncle Jon’s room. Poor UJ. We spent a quiet Christmas day at my grandparents in Brookfield, MO, and were up very, very early to get on a plane to San Francisco.

My dad’s entire family is in California, but except for him, the rest of us hadn’t been out for six and a half years. There has been some pretty awful drama which you may know about, and the details of which I’m not going to go into right now. Suffice to say, I’m so thankful we went, and that such a thing was even possible, but it was a surreal experience. We met my Granddad’s new wife, Shirley, and saw lots of cousins, whom I knew I had met before, but whose faces were unfamiliar. Last time I saw my cousin Lorenzo, we were kids and we visited the Jelly Belly factory together, this time he got more cheerful with each of four beers. It has been a very long time. We visited St. Mary’s Cemetery where my Grammy’s memorial is. We all stood around in the grocery store beforehand and said “I have never bought flowers for a grave before. How does one do this thing?” We got yellow because that was her favorite color. We visited my Aunt Sharon in the little house in Sacramento where Grammy and all of her siblings grew up. We drove down to Orange County to see my uncle and aunt and cousins. We went to a beach (a beach!) on New Year’s Eve. There was Bananagrams and a deeply competitive game of Silver Screen Trivial Pursuit.

I’m still sort of in awe that all of this could happen. That we could get on a plane in ten degree weather, and get off to see trees heavy with oranges down every other block. That Mary and I could sit there and watch as Grammy’s sister, my Aunt Marge, and Granddad’s new wife next to each other on my cousin Nancy’s couch making friends. That my family could step out of the car on Partrick Road in Napa, where my dad grew up, and smell the eucalyptus, and chew on stalks of anise. I had not remembered that California was so beautiful. Wherever we went I always felt like we were in a valley, surrounded by mountains that looked like cozy giants sleeping in extravagant positions. I could pick out a rumpled shirt-tail here, the crook of an elbow there. The palm trees that were not pruned looked quite silly—as if they were wearing shaggy fur coats beneath a bad hairdo. I looked out the window a lot.

Yet the trip was not idyllic. I suppose I am too old for that to be possible, but it was more than that. We never saw anybody long enough to get properly comfortable with them, and even then my aunt and her lies seemed to lurk a little triumphantly in the corner of every conversation. And there’s another thing. I think I missed Christmas. I mean, really, where was it? There was that one quiet day at Grandma’s, but I was busy packing. It is a silly thought, but I feel as though Christmas and I planned to meet, but missed each other by a few minutes. That doesn’t mean, though, that it didn’t happen. When I got off the plane from Pittsburgh and walked toward the baggage claim, there was a large group with American flags and signs, waiting for their soldier. I was a little shamed to walk past them in my dress and leggings. I was so obviously not the hero they had come to meet. Then my sister jumped suddenly out from behind them trying to scare me and hug me all at once, and I could feel their smiles at our little reunion, and I didn’t feel embarrassed anymore. That was Christmas. In Iowa, we took a cousin picture wearing light-up necklaces. That was Christmas. In California, we drove down the road in our cramped rental car listening to Simon and Garfunkel, and George snored on my shoulder. That was Christmas. Last night driving back from the Kansas City airport the stars above me refused to come into focus. They stayed icy and soft no matter how I squinted, so I closed my eyes and went to sleep. That was Christmas.

Christmas is no less than a promise fulfilled, an expectation realized. We are told every year that Christmas will come again. It does. “When we are faithless, he remains faithful.” He does. “For there is born to you this day in the city of David a Savior, who is Christ the Lord.”  And He is.