Southern Legitimacy Statement: I grew up in Virginia! I’m now attending college at Virginia Tech, just slowly moving more south with each passing year it seems. We have several Appalachian history classes if that counts for anything (I have never gotten to take one, everybody boo now ).
Nineteen
My boots make a familiar soft scuffling noise on the barely frozen ground, covered in a mix of dirty driveway slush and ice. It’s the third day of December and there’s snot freezing to the underside of my nose despite my best efforts, we stand clustered in long lines along the side street. It’s the Christmas parade where every local business, national bank and girl scout troop will shuffle through town, throwing candy as they go. It’s a grey day in Virginia, and there’s heat at the back of my legs from the fire pit a few steps away, containing the remains of three marshmallows I failed to hold on to. Jingle Bell Rock is playing for the third time in a row. In the house behind that, everyone over 33 is drinking spiked cider from a crockpot, one that is two steps away from being a fire hazard. It is printed with little pink flowers, and has white ceramic knobs with the paint chipping off.
I know of everyone but don’t recognize a single face, after a rogue airhead with a church pamphlet stapled to the back hits me in the calf I turn to enter the house. I can hear fervent talking and my mother’s laugh, and of course Jingle Bell Rock, but not much else. The house is cramped and sweat-warm, the air is noticeably sticky but in a way that emanates familiarity. You can tell someone sprayed Febreze in the carpet. Everyone here is my parents’ coworker, they know me from a thousand secondhand stories, Facebook posts and first-day-of-school pictures. I don’t know them but it’s okay, they don’t mind. I’m handed fat pigs in a blanket on metallic paper plates, and asked how school is going by a woman who looks all too much like my kindergarten lunch lady, of who is definitely dead by now. I both miss being a child and know I am not yet ready for co-workers and cider.
I sit down on a feather-soft couch that smells of unfamillair perfumes to eat a cold candy cane, I half listen to my dad telling his favorite party story while a little boy with a DIY bowlcut throws a tantrum outside. The vast majority of children here were under the age of ten, we were not strangers to the sporadic scream of a cranky child wronged. I check my phone for texts like a reflex I barely notice.
I smile because the kid reminds me of my brother more than a few years ago, he usually doesn’t come to these anymore. It’s not really about the parade. He is getting older too..
I look down at my old boots my mom got from the TJ Maxx that used to be a Mexican restaurant, that used to be a mattress store, there’s clay-colored mud in the creases. I shuffle over to the table covered in a winter-themed tablecloth, from either the Dollar General or the Joanne Fabrics, it was anyone’s guess. There were ten kinds of Tupperware, nobody would be heading home with the lids they came with.
The woman whose house it is, who is now divorced but happier than she used to be sidles up to me, pressing jam-filled cookies into my hands, she reminds me of an aunt I don’t have. I have three aunts.
She smiles like she’s nervous, and sits down in the armchair across from me. A puff of expensive smoky perfume that hurts my nose follows her. She’s wearing a light up Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer sweater, and despite being both too young and too old for this event. 19 and a little nostalgic is the perfect age for a Rudolph sweater. She reaches over and pats my hand.
“I started college when I was 24,” she says, and the context is not needed, my mother was nearly as devastated as I was when I didn’t get into college right out of highschool. Everyone knew and it didn’t bother me that they did, because I knew in all reality it wasn’t the end of the world, but I felt left behind, having a childhood Christmas season on what was supposed to be my first year away, ever, and as someone who never got to drive, due to a pair of bum eyes, this was the first milestone in years that had felt within reach. Despite the fact it was December, the year-end I was counting down to was still very many months away.
I smile, and I nod.
“Oh yeah?” I feign an interest I mean kindly but can’t muster, my fingertips being reawakened by a paper cup of cider with too much cinnamon. It burned going down your throat, but no one cared. The spiked cider was the main event, I was still relegated to the kids stuff. I did secretly like it better if I was being honest.
She talks about her summe trips and her volunteering, her career and her children and her life, somewhat meant to be a reassurance for me but I wonder if she simply didn’t have anyone to tell her story to these days.
In an hour or maybe two if we all take our time we’ll walk back down the street, taking our slow, meandering goodbyes to one another. The sun is high and bright in the sky. We will head to the small parking lot outside the historic bar and the not so historic boutique, that never had enough parking and drive home. It is a collection of small, somewhat neutral things, but it is one of my best days, and it is the best third of December. I just didn’t know it at the time, because many last times are unknowingly perfect.
