The sky was always gray the years they didn't come. Those gloomy skies were an omen, a sign from God, like cows kneeling in the pasture on Christmas Eve in anticipation of the coming of the Christ child.

I remember watching the cows under an overcast sky those years my parents didn't come for Christmas. It seemed like those times were often when I was a child, but in reality, they were only a fraction of the eleven years I was in exhile on the family ranch.

Most years, the sky was sunny and warm and orange, as if awaiting their arrival and the joy that accompanied it. Those were the years I felt the joy of Christmas. However, it's the three or four times they didn't come I remember most vividly.

House built by my grandfather over  80 years ago, where I was born and reared.

My brother, John, and sat on my grandmother's front porch most of Christmas Eve watching the winding road

that wound around my favorite tree,

 up to the gate that marked our property, then past the pasture next to Mt. Pleasant Baptist Church where Aunt J was a member,

and on around Mud Creek Road (my name for a dirt road that has since been named something else) to the paved road that lead into town and Highway 6.

You could see coming cars as they drove down the hill past the church if you looked carefully, but usually our young eager eyes missed our father's latest luxury car (either a Cadillac or a Lincoln) until it was either at the gate or already throught it, heading toward the bend in the road around my tree.

And sometimes we didn't see it at all because they'd arrive in the middle of the night and I'd have to get up and help Grandma get everyone situated. My parents always slept in the "front bedroom,"  but our ever expanding family of brothers and sisters had to be put to bed and that became my duty every Christmas that they came and most summers, when they always came if I didn't go to visit them in Oklahoma or Kansas, depending on what church my was father pastoring at the time.

Whether or not my family came to Texas for Christmas was always  my father's decision and I think some years he denied my grandmother the joy of a visit from her eldest as payback for Grandma objecting to their marriage. My father could be very viindictive, a trait I inherited from him but managed to overcome, deciding to let God have vengeance which the Bible says is His anyway.

I was a victim of my father's vindictive nature after I confronted him on his infidelity as a young adult. Shortly, after that I went to graduate school less than thirty miles from the small Kansas Mennonite community where my family lived and my father pastored a small Baptist church.

I graduated two years later, but no one in my family attended my graduation. My father had a "speaking" engagement at another church and required my mother and siblings to go with him to provide musical back-up for his sermon.

Later, my mother told me she cried the entire time she played the organ. For years, I only blamed my father for ruining my graduation. The teacher in the classroom where I did student teaching, who disliked me (the feeling was mutual), felt sorry for me and attended as my only guest; while my roommate, who was getting her bachelor's degree, had half of Kansas City come to see her graduate.

I finally realized my mother was also at fault for not standing up to my vindictive father who was punishing me for standing up to him. She should have told him she was going to see her daughter get a master's degree and to get someone else to play the damn organ.

She should also have told him every year that I lived in Texas that she was coming to be with my brother and me regardless of any circumstances, short of nuclear war, that he might see as preventing that annual sojourn to brighten the lives of two discarded children and the gray skies that always loomed over us when we were forgotten at that "most special time of the year."

My mother with John (the one with the dredlocks) and our youngest brother, Joseph, on trip to Texas where they spent Thanksgiving 2009. Thanks to  Joseph's life partner, Leslie, for all the great photos.