The Christmas house in our neighborhood was at the bottom of the hill on the corner lot next to the Limeport Pike — we passed it anytime we turned onto the pike to go into town (love the word pike — “Something’s coming down the pike”).
We passed it whenever we took the sea-green Rambler to the IGA or to the Moravian church in town or to my best friend’s, who lived near Hopewell Elementary where I went to first through third grade before they redistricted and sent me to Liberty Bell Elementary and I was The New Kid for the first, but not last, time.
The Christmas house was small and white, and perpetually decorated. A four-foot-high plastic snowman of three perfectly spherical plastic snowballs topped with a black plastic top hat stood in the yard, smiling his black plastic coal-lump smile day in and day out. Were there reindeer, yes, and plastic candy canes and Christmas lights too? I remember that there were, but I could be wrong.
And was there a white fence around the yard? The kind with two rows of rough horizontal boards with tapered ends tucked into slots in the fenceposts? (And would I be a better writer if I knew the word for that kind of fence and could pull it out of an index file in my head at exactly the right moment?) I squint and I can see the fence clearly, but I do not know if it is real.
Every school-day morning my older sister and I waited at the bus stop next to the Christmas house after walking down the hill, and every school-day afternoon we stepped off the bus to walk back up the hill. We never saw who lived there, but I imagined it was a little old lady with stooped shoulders and white hair. I didn’t really want to meet whoever lived there. I was shy of strangers and did not know what kind of person lived in a house with Christmas decorations up all year round.
Walking home up the hill from the Christmas house, the days I liked the best were days it had rained, because a stream, a mini river almost, ran down the hill on the side of the road in the little ditch of asphalt. We didn’t have proper gutters, as there were no sidewalks — the grass from people’s front yards ran right up to the road.
On the way home on the days it had rained I would dawdle behind my sister and look for rocks and sticks to make dams in the river at the side of the road, and if it was fall there would be leaves to plaster in between the crevices to make the dams even bigger. Where the water backed up, a little pond would form. And maybe I would find a curly leaf to float in the pond as a boat for the imaginary people who lived on the banks of the river.
I would stay until I absolutely had to go home or I got cold, whichever came first. And the snowman at the bottom of the hill stood watch, smiling his perpetual smile as the dams disintegrated overnight.
Photo courtesy Valerie Everett via Creative Commons license
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