A Small and Perfect Gift

This year I woke to the first white Christmas Texas has seen since 1926. As I was beginning my drive from Austin to Dallas, fierce head winds sprang up from the northwest and the weather deteriorated rapidly into the kind of instant storm we sometimes get in Texas. The wind was gusting to forty plus miles per hour, snapping off road signs and hurtling icy rain punctuated with snow, slantways across the highway and into that variant beyond which is a highway's only constant, so fiercely that keeping my FJ-40 Landcruiser on the road became my sole focus. By the time I got to Dallas snow was general from there on north and west, but I didn’t expect it to last, because it almost never does.

My parents have a bungalow behind their house which is where I stay when I’m in town and when I arrived, dad had already built a mesquite wood fire and it was nice to drop my bag and
 sink into the old leather couch with a cup of coffee, the road and weather and all that finally at bay, thinking that later I'd raid the freezer, rig up the grill and sear a ribeye over the incandescent coals,

When we first moved there in the seventies, the structure behind the house was a two car garage, but they soon converted it into a game room witha pool table which opened onto a large, split level patio and gazebo situated directly behind it. The aforementioned stone fireplace dominated the western end of the uppermost level. Over the years they enclosed all of it and now it’s three, twenty by twenty rooms in a straight line, each successive room two feet higher than its predecessor. The floors are brick and the load bearing timbers are rough hewn and exposed.

Before my first wedding my parents threw a party for us there and for the occasion I made a huge chandelier from the iron hoop of an ancient wagon wheel I’d found years before and carted around to rent house after rent house, but I'd finally found its new purpose. I spaced twelve candles—one for each month of the year—evenly around the outer edge and suspended it from the high roof beam by four large chains. This and an enormopus pine table that seats sixteen reinforces the builidng’s look and feel of a medieval hall. The fireplace screen I made as well, using angle iron and expanded steel. In the center I placed a four leaf clover welded together from horse shoes and Christmas Eve as I lay in front of the fire, its eight foot shadow was cast to flicker and dance on the ceiling as Bart, my Chesapeake Bay Retriever, nodded into his deep and fitful dreams.

There is a king sized bed on the lowest level but I always sleep on the couch facing the fireplace, even in the summer, because for whatever reason—fire or no—I feel safe and comfortable there. Christmas Eve was cold though and I built the fire up with a mix of pecan, mesquite and split, white oak logs and wrapping myself in an old Hudson Bay point blanket and even older silence lay on the couch thinking about the ending year and the past and the “future” even though I know it can’t really be said to exist. Eventually I drifted off to a dreamless sleep.

Christmas broke cold and white and as my parents and I got in their car to go to my sister’s for breakfast my mom mentioned a peculiar pattern in the snow. Duck Creek creek is less than a hundred yards or so to the northeast of their house and growing up it was a favorite retreat for my friends and I. The variety of wildlife there was—and probably still is—amazing. Migratory ducks, catfish and perch, frogs of course, snakes from the benign to the fatal, wandering tribes of other kids we didn’t know and with whom we sometimes fought and sometimes played, all in all it was a whole other world below street level. Years ago I took my four year old nephew down there in one of my Landcruisers and when we got stuck, I told him we would just have to live there from then on and he, demonstrating the faith and acceptance that only the innocent posess, went off to find wood for a fire so that we’d  be warm and comfortable in our new life.

In recent years, coyotes—adapting to their ever shrinking habitat—have moved into Duck Creek as well, precipitating a stunning decline in the number of housecats and small, backyard dogs. So when my mom called my attention to the yard, I more or less dismissed it. I had already noticed where a single canine of some denomiation had tracked through, a long serpentine arc punctuated with evenly spaced indentions where its nose had momentarily touched the snow, tracking its hopeful meal, but that wasn’t what she’d seen.

I eased the car to a stop for a better look and it dawned on my mother and I at the same time. Some tiny child, maybe but if so no more than two or three years old, had left a small and perfect snow angel. It was close to the sidewalk and the lack of tracks was no mystery, but that was all the child had left, no scoops of snow taken, no tracks, nothing. Just that particular gift.