Entries

Winter Walk

Kitey, Paul and I went out one night to see the Christmas lights. Kite knew about a special display by the electric company, which featured an electrician going up and down a lighted pole - a real specialty item in this town, which mostly features giant blow-up snowmen and lit-up Wal-Mart reindeer.

We all bundled up in our warmest clothes and set out. We passed the yippity yappity Scotty dog that lives on the corner and headed across the street to the richie residential neighborhood, where people live in ornate houses that would have been funeral homes in Northeast Pennsylvania. Kite rolled her eyes when a cat started following us; Paul may be terrified of dogs, but if there’s a cat within half a mile, it will come and follow him around like a hopeful puppy.

I felt sad, walking down the empty dark streets, knowing this would be the last winter I’d spend in the Ozarks. I’ve been coming to this small town since the summer of my fifteenth year, and knowing that any future visits would only be temporary gave this walk a bittersweet feel. We finally spotted the electric company’s display from far away and Paul was entranced. The “worker” would start at the bottom, move to the middle of the poll, then the top, and vanish only to start again at the bottom.

Because we couldn’t see the actual structure of the display from that far away, it seemed like magic to Paul. “Look, Mama! The man disappears at the top! Where does he go?”

When we arrived at the structure, he was able to discern the way it had been put together, while Kite and I giggled over the fact that the electric company had put the display together with spit, tape, and about fourteen extension cords. Bad electric company. No Christmas tree shaped cookies for you.

“I want to go back to where we were before,” said Paul, “to where it looked real.”

We backed up. I was walking backwards with my head tipped back to watch the stars. The winter sky was a clear black and the stars stood out so bright against it. I thought at first I was seeing a shooting star, then I realized I was watching a V of birds - the white underside of their wings almost glowing in the darkness - flying in complete silence over us. I pointed them out to Paul and Kite.

“I think those might be cranes,” said Kite. “They’re so big, and so quiet. When I was growing up there were just 28 whooping cranes left in the world. And there was a pond in back of our house, where birds used to stop on their migration paths to rest. We would hide and watch with binoculars, our bird books open on the ground next to us. And one day these big white birds landed, and my brother described them while I looked them up in the bird book. They were the whooping cranes. Right there in our pond.”

We all watched in wonder, until the cranes were too far away to see.

© 2003 QN Podcast (formerly Quirky Nomads).