My puppies are running, circling, wrestling in this overcast of Christmas Day, bounding through grasses brown and fledgling green. Christmas Day is a demarcation of sorts, singular handful of days over our lives, days to remember through the long years. Has this Christmas Day been better? Has it been different? Here on these meadow moors — an Ozarks southern mountaintop — this green Christmas Day becomes a strange overcast middle. An in-between space of gloom and promise.
There have been traditional Christmases past, full of bright sun and icy snow and kicking the ice from boots, coming into a warm and noisy house full of gifts and expectations, memories of the past and childhood flannel 'jammies, hope full for a future now itself long-past. Surely Christmas Day, 1990, is a future date, surely? Last decade before the new century, the new millennium, embryonic technology in form of computer floppy disks and MS-DOS promising a better world, there amid the mounds of torn wrapping paper and twinkling Christmas lights.
Then there were Christmas Eves at Grandpa and Grandma's, dark nights of soup suppers with mysterious packages beneath a dark tree, a tree simply hung with those big, old-fashioned bulbs of indigo, crimson and emerald, there, in a house where there was the creak of Grandpa's chair, the smell of percolator coffee, and the way the cold winter air gusted when cousins opened the white front door. I was four and could not imagine that life would end. Or that we could and would grow older.
A sudden tug of collar brings me from my reverie. The pups are tussling, here and now, but Christmas Day is otherwise quiet. Mountain mist slowly falls, dew heavy on the cedars. The year has been long, lonely, broken, beautiful, full of hope, a personal tale, slowly rebuilding from the unknown. Not all Christmases are made the same. Holiday loss is felt most poignantly, most painfully. I will light a candle for this particular spoke of the grand wheel of the year. A yelp, playful jaws of dog on soft and bounding dog. They wrestle again.
Dogs’ lives are short and I am not an old man, not yet. In heartbreaking clarity, I know I will stand somewhere like this yet again, a green and brown field beneath an overcast southern sky, far in the future. There will be achievements. So many things for which I am currently striving will become reality and there will be family again, a noisy house, and gifts beneath the tree. And I will take a moment and stand alone beneath that overcast southern sky, alone and not understood. I will weep for a lost moment, remembering friends long gone, weeping for this moment, right here, wishing for this past, as I hold my puppies close once again, and cherish this, an overlooked heaven that will not come again, this Christmas Day.