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