Christmas Past/Christmas Present

My mother passed away in September 2017. I was born on Christmas Day, so this Christmas is my first without her. I wrote this story 3 years ago when visiting her before Christmas, memories came to me.

My mother had been in the hospital, and came home earlier in the week, after recovering from a stroke.

 

I drove over to visit her, and to drop off Christmas gifts for her and my father. I also returned the perpetual birthday card she had given me years ago for my Christmas birthday so that she could write the year in it for me.

 

We sat in the kitchen, visiting, she got up to make a cup of coffee. I have associated coffee with my mother for as long as I can remember. The aroma of the coffee filled the room, and suddenly in my mind the scene changed.

 

I was in another kitchen, this one in Smoky Lake, again seated at a kitchen table, but the woman with me was my mother in her youth, her skin smooth, her hair darker, short as she has worn it most of her life, and wavy. She was young, in her early twenties, and beautiful.

 

On the stove a coffee percolator sat, the brown liquid bubbled up into the clear glass knob on its lid, it made a happy blurping sound as the coffee brewed, and the room was full of its pungent aroma.

 

In one corner of the kitchen was a baby pram, in it my sister Pamela, born only three months before. She was asleep.

 

On the kitchen counter a small radio, the glow of its dial shining through the numbers printed on it.  It had a chocolate brown case, and a cream colored face. I remember the warmth, and the smell, and the light the tubes threw on the wall behind it at night. "Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer" came through its speaker, the music wafting through the room.

 

Also sitting at the table was my dad's mother, my grandmother. We called her Baba, as was the custom in Ukrainian families. I was her first grandchild, my sister Pam in the pram, her second. I always thought of Baba as old, but she was only forty-six years old at the time.

 

The smell of fresh cut spruce came into the room through the doorway, my grandfather, Dido, had delivered a Black Spruce, its needles short and plentiful, dark green in color, for our Christmas tree. He would head off into the woods on his farm, with a large bow saw slung over his shoulder, and would harvest a tree for each of his family members every year. My dad and he set it up in the tree stand for my mother to decorate.

 

I looked at the window beside me, frost patterns of feathers, ferns, trees, stars and thousands of other images excited my imagination and entertained me. My mother explained to me in her soft voice that Jack Frost had blown his breath on the window to make pictures for me.

 

All of this flashed through my mind in an instant, sixty years later, another Christmas, another kitchen, my Baba gone for many years, no frost on the window, but the coffee stirred all these ancient memories up for me. I remained silent about it, overwhelmed by it all. I looked at my mother, frail, and tired from her hospital stay, and I could still see that young woman.

 

I was preparing to leave and go do some errands I had for our own Christmas preparations, when my father said "Wait, I have something of Dido's in the garage for you." He returned with my grandfather's ancient bow saw, the one I watched him cut firewood with for years, the same saw he would sling over his shoulder to go into the woods to get Christmas trees for his two sons and his daughter every year.

 

My father would have had this saw in his garage for over twenty years now, I have no idea what made him decide that today he would pass it on to me. I had no idea he even had the old saw from the farm. I had not thought of it for decades, until the short flash of memory I had about that Christmas past, when I was three.

 

Merry Christmas to all!