Favorite December  Memories

--Traveling across country from Santa Barbara, California to the Blue Ridge foothills of North Carolina.  Three days, three nights.  Sitting beside my father in the car late at night.  Just the two of us.  Not much talking between us, but occasionally he'd ask me to open the dash and check the map.  All other geography lessons pale in comparison.

--Arriving in the hollow.  Cousins came in large numbers to greet us.  Suddenly fields, and streams, and mountains, and red dirt were at my feet. In 1969, an unforgettable snow.   Horses in winter. A small country church with beautiful singing.  Brown paper sacks filled with oranges, nuts, peppermints and chocolate drops.  A gathering with relatives, so many the house swelled.

--My grandmother in her galley kitchen, every morn.  A hummer while stirring in her pots.  Her small printed aprons. Her hands deep in a bowl of white, self-rising flour.   Coffee on the iron cook stove.  Ham sizzling in the pan.  Red-eye gravy.

--My grandfather on his way out the door and down the hill.  Osh-Kosh snaps a'flying.  His return with a a bucket of coal.  His radio blaring, Swap and Shop, this is Pappy. The large farm house creaking as it warmed.

--Mother smiling.  At home.  Tall, willowy, dark beauty. A teller of stories.  Everyone's gentle favorite.  Packing homeless Granger a gift box full of apple stack pies, roast beef,  fruit.  Soaking fruitcake in bourbon and cheesecloth wrappings. Singing Silent Night.  A genuine, ready glance.  The lightest touch.

-- Family. Winter elements.  Warm fires.  Quilts suspended from the ceilings, in the make.  Quilts warming old iron beds.  The waft of a woman's melody. The movement of strong men.  The rambling of kin. Rain on a tin roof. Smokehouse preserves.  Memories in my mind forever forming, forever centering, what each new December brings.

All the best to you and yours.