December 2015 – Colin Loves Tractors

Christmas Wishes

The pressure to synthesize childhood magic is never more intense than at Christmas, the official season of idealized future memoires. If you fail as a parent, you are assured to leave behind you a wake of ruined dreams and the bitter shards of a lifetime of disappointment. Multiply the pressure by some factor if your child is eligible for hospice; divide by another if that child knows that Santa is his parents. I’m okay at math, but not this kind of math, so I’ve thrown up my hands and capitulated to the random forces of life and improvisation.

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A Storm Breaks

I walk to the car under a sun that is determined to dry up the rain that has soaked the town, Colin in his wheelchair, spent but less feverish after a visit to the hospital for routine maintenance of his sub-cutaneous port following a fever. We’re fairly certain that Colin merely suffered from an ailment, with many of his schoolmates struck down by similar afflictions, but the merest chance that a spike in temperature could be the first sign of a dangerous line infection sent us scrambling to the local Emergency Department the first thing in the morning. It is standard procedure, a minor inconvenience in our world, which followed a very non-standard and magical weekend.
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O Tannenbaum

Colin squints in the sunlight posing next to his brother in front of this year’s Christmas tree, which towers many yards above them. This behemoth dwarfs our house, but we will only bring the very top inside. It’s an absurd way to pick a Christmas tree, trying to determine from far below whether it has appealing proportions and density, but that’s not the point this year. Colin later declares that this Christmas tree farm is “be-au-ti-ful,” and this is all that matters, that and our experience here as a family at the Christmas-tree-farm-that-never-was but is now part of Greensprings, a nature preserve and cemetery.
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The Magic in the Mundane

Sunlight glimmers on imperfections in the plane window. I call them imperfections, though I suspect they are fractures in the plastic from the stress of flight, the long parallel tracks streaming down at an angle in silver lines like incandescent rain drops. There is no rain, of course, high above the field of white puffs below, in what is someone else’s pale blue sky, dotted with clouds on a bright day. Continue reading The Magic in the Mundane