30 December 2014
December 30th. I smell the Christmas tree. Morning sun is pouring through the windows. I’m listening to ‘Music to Inspire Positive Thinking’. A new habit since Vaughn died. I’m drinking coffee, black. The smell of the Christmas tree is the same as when I was a child, and every year my mom would love its scent and its simple green majesty so much she would say, “Oh, let’s just leave it the way it is!” Every year. But we always ended up decorating it. The tree smells the same as it did every year when the children were little. When sometimes we would haul one down from the ranch, or at least chop one down from a tree farm. This year and last Livia and I went to the tree farm but we just bought a pre-cut tree. It’s a good one. It smells the same.
I’m crying. Looking at the big gold-sprayed, macaroni-encrusted, red-yarn-bowed ornament with a what?–6, or even 5-year old Vaughn peering from the center of it. How long before this ornament disintegrates–before the Elmer’s finally loosens its hold on the artfully placed pasta?
I tell myself that little boy would be gone anyway–just like the shy little 3-year old Livia on the other side of the tree. Those little children live in my heart.
I can see this writing is going from nostalgia to self-pity. I started out trying to sort what’s changed and what’s still here. The awareness of movement through the window as the wind picks up on this cold, bright morning. Yes, that’s familiar. The scent of the tree. A sense of aloneness, or more like the feeling of being adrift in a mysterious world. That is familiar also from my earliest memories.
And so, I will go and have a shower. Liv and I will drive to Calistoga on this bright shiny day and take mud baths. Because we are still here. And I know Mom, and Don, and Vaughn will be somehow with us. Because they always are. How could it be otherwise?
Vaughn's Mom 