The smell of coalsmoke and Christmas

Living in this part of Georgia is a treat from a meterological standpoint. Today, I drove down Georgia 16 to Turin, then down Georgia 74 to just north of Luthersville, in Meriwether County. Despite the rain in cold in other parts of the United States, the temperature hovered just below 70 degrees this afternoon, and the sky was as blue and clear as could be.

I drove over the Flint River and received a surprise when I noticed that the river had overflown its banks and was flooding the surrounding field east of the normal bounds of the river. When I crossed over the bridge, I noticed that the water level seemed to peak just below the level of the bridge. That's a lot of water.

There are still some leaves on some of the trees around here. Mostly yellow oaks and gum trees. The evergreen trees are starting to predominate. You can see cedar trees along the fencerows where the birds ate the berries and planted a new tree. In my part of the world, cedar trees were the normal Christmas tree, being so common.

When I was in college, a bunch of my buddies and I used to hold a party before exams started at Christmas time. We would walk down the ROTC trail and find a cedar tree growing out of the rocks, and we would borrow a saw from the building and grounds office and carry the tree back to the apartment along Woods Creek. We were pretty imaginative with our decorations.

Later on, we would fill a garbage can with gallons of apple cider, a fifth of bourbon and a fifth of golden grain and enjoy the lights we had bought at Kroger for the tree. It would only be a few days until exams were over and we would all disperse to our various homes and families. Still, it was nice to enjoy a little preliminary taste of Christmas in Virginia.

I do miss that, just like I miss going up to Clarksville and Hopkinsville at Christmas time. That was fun. I guess the last time I did that was when my grandmother passed away after Thanksgiving. The skies were grey and the wind was cold and there were big flakes of snow, like silver dollars, coming down in the cemetery as we headed from the gravesite to our cars and one more supper in the old dining room at the farm.

You see, I can still hold on to that magic, if only in my thoughts. My thoughts expand my universe beyond the here and now and stretch back to cedar tree Christmas trees in Virginia and Tennessee, country ham and turkey, great aunts telling family stories in the hall, and the perfect warmth of Christmas, while the cold December wind blew its fury against the old white frame farmhouse. The scream of the wind could not mar the Christmas inside, nor can the passage of the years.