Here is the story of one of Marnie's stories:
The Gift of Christmas Quiet forty years later....
On Wed, Jan 1, 2020 at 10:29 AM Cindy wrote:
“Hi Marnie-
You do not know me; nor me you. I was packing up Christmas on this lovely New Year morning in Raleigh, NC counting my blessings to put the end of 2019 behind us...my husband Bob survived emergency surgery for an aortic dissection on October 24 this year and then experienced 3 more heart surgeries and a right brain stroke between 10/24 and 11/20 and we returned home from the UNC Hospital on December 9th....when I came across an old Advent devotional booklet we made for our church, Benson Memorial United Methodists Church in 1989. The scripture is “Return, O my soul, to your rest.” -Psalms 116:7.
I always try to take time out from all the hustle and bustle of the season to relax and read two wonderful Christmas stories...Truman Capote’s “ A Christmas Memory” and the other is yours “A Gift of Christmas Quiet” which I tore out of a “ladies’ magazine” years ago. I have since lost my copy of your story. I learned it was published in Redbook December 1980. …is this story available in any of your publications? I want to add it my Christmas stash. I know it gave me so much joy...and who doesn’t want joy!!!! Please let me know where I can get a copy of this. Thank you so much!”
I wrote back to Cindy that I appreciated hearing from her and would try to locate a copy of the story. Sadly, I no longer had a copy of that long ago magazine and the only on line reference I could find was that the issue in question was missing from the Redbook archive. Had she and her husband encountered my web site www.songsofseeing.com which might be comforting to them both?
Then I forwarded her message to my nephew Paul who forty years ago was the star of the story. He’s now head of the Physics Department at a prominent university. “Paul, remember this?”
Remember he did indeed, and in short order he messaged me that he had located a copy and would be sending it to me shortly. Never underestimate the research capabilities of a physics professor!
Cindy was delighted. “This is a wonderful gift of the new year, for me and for my husband, Bob. Also, I intend to share this with my cousin who has ms and my brother-in-law who has Parkinson’s.” Then Cindy wrote that this cousin had found the perfect music for the story:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TQIPuuJLhlY
Nature, that miracle which is Life, is indeed the source of our soul’s rest and healing. The joy that is sharing is a lesson we cannot ponder often enough!
No literary honor, no amount of royalties can measure up to the sweetness of this true story, this unexpected gift for the New Year.
“Hi Marnie-
You do not know me; nor me you. I was packing up Christmas on this lovely New Year morning in Raleigh, NC counting my blessings to put the end of 2019 behind us...my husband Bob survived emergency surgery for an aortic dissection on October 24 this year and then experienced 3 more heart surgeries and a right brain stroke between 10/24 and 11/20 and we returned home from the UNC Hospital on December 9th....when I came across an old Advent devotional booklet we made for our church, Benson Memorial United Methodists Church in 1989. The scripture is “Return, O my soul, to your rest.” -Psalms 116:7.
I always try to take time out from all the hustle and bustle of the season to relax and read two wonderful Christmas stories...Truman Capote’s “ A Christmas Memory” and the other is yours “A Gift of Christmas Quiet” which I tore out of a “ladies’ magazine” years ago. I have since lost my copy of your story. I learned it was published in Redbook December 1980. …is this story available in any of your publications? I want to add it my Christmas stash. I know it gave me so much joy...and who doesn’t want joy!!!! Please let me know where I can get a copy of this. Thank you so much!”
I wrote back to Cindy that I appreciated hearing from her and would try to locate a copy of the story. Sadly, I no longer had a copy of that long ago magazine and the only on line reference I could find was that the issue in question was missing from the Redbook archive. Had she and her husband encountered my web site www.songsofseeing.com which might be comforting to them both?
Then I forwarded her message to my nephew Paul who forty years ago was the star of the story. He’s now head of the Physics Department at a prominent university. “Paul, remember this?”
Remember he did indeed, and in short order he messaged me that he had located a copy and would be sending it to me shortly. Never underestimate the research capabilities of a physics professor!
Cindy was delighted. “This is a wonderful gift of the new year, for me and for my husband, Bob. Also, I intend to share this with my cousin who has ms and my brother-in-law who has Parkinson’s.” Then Cindy wrote that this cousin had found the perfect music for the story:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TQIPuuJLhlY
Nature, that miracle which is Life, is indeed the source of our soul’s rest and healing. The joy that is sharing is a lesson we cannot ponder often enough!
No literary honor, no amount of royalties can measure up to the sweetness of this true story, this unexpected gift for the New Year.
from Redbook, December 1980...and here is the story itself:
A Gift of Christmas Quiet
A Short Short Story by Marnie Reed Crowell
The icy wind brought tears to his eyes and stung his nose. The books n his knapsack seemed to jab into his back with each step he took. Four more days until Christmas vacation. The whole sixth grade was already acting crazy—even the teachers. Especially the teachers. All the way up the lane from the corner, where the yellow school bus had dropped him off, to the farmhouse, where he lived, Paul kept his head ducked and kicked at the broken crusts of snow.
It was no longer snowing, but the wind had picked ip loose flakes from on top of the old snow and was sending them rolling and bouncing up the hill from the empty cornfield. It laid windrows of snow in the lee of each bare maple tree before whirling off across the lonely meadows.
Paul stamped up the back steps and into the kitchen. He threw down his knapsack and tossed his cap on top of it.
“Did you have a good day?” asked his mother. She was rolling out Christmas cookies at the table in fron t of the window at the other end of the kitchen.
“No. Somebody got paint all over the bookends I’m making for Dad in Shop and we had chorus practice for three straight periods. I’m never going to sing ‘Jingle Bells’ again.
“Where is your brother?” his mother asked, approaching him and tactfully putting a warm cookie in his hand.
“He stayed for pageant rehearsal,” Paul said brusquely, signaling the end of the conversation. His mother turned back to her floured board and rolling pin. She had planned to ask Paul if he wanted to help, but she continued working the cookie dough in silence.
Paul shook the melted snow from his cap and pulled it back on, low over his ears. After giving the cat at his feet a quick rub on the nose, he banged back out the door.
On the back porch, Paul took thelid from the can that held the sunflower seeds for the birds and grinned in spite of himself. A deer mouse looked up at him from the seeds and wiggled its whiskers.
“Thief”, Paul said to himself. Then he changed his mind. Wasn’t it just as good to feed a cute moue as to feed the birds?
“Better watch out for the cat,” Paul muttered as he replaced the lid, taking care to leave it ajar.
He poured a scoopful of seeds into the bird feeder hanging in the crab apple tree and kept a handful to put into his pocket. Then he hurried into the barn. It was cold and dark in there, and had been since they had sold their milk cows. He fed the chickens and soon was on his way out into the freedom of the snowy pastures.
The sun was hanging very low over the bare trees of the hedgerow. The wind had dropped. The hour before the early-winter sunset was often the best hour of the day. Paul strode briskly over the crusty snow. A blue shadow caught his eye. It was a tiny hole in the snow, scarcely bigger than his thumbnail. He squatted and peered in. The entrance to the tiny tunnel was ringed with long blades of grass coated with delicate frost crystals, like the frost from his breath on this parka. Paul figured that the passageway was the right size for a mouse. He knew that meadow mice build snug, round nests of clipped grass and that their runways tunnel under the snow for long distances. He almost never saw any tracks leading to or from the holes. He liked to think that the mice looked out from the holes at night to watch the stars. He ws sure that whatever the mice used the holes for, they really did want them open. A few daysa go he had chopped out a chunk of snow crust with his mittened hand and laid it gently over a hole. He had flagged the spot with a stick. The next day when he came back, the snow boulder had been pushed aside and the tunnel hatch was open once again. Paul would not make extra work for the mice today.
A pair of chickadees buzzed around his head. Another pair was making scolding sounds from the bush ahead of him. They fluttered in front of his s if they were expecting something. Indeed they were. He smiled and pulled off one mitten and took a handful of sound flower seeds out of his pocket. He stood very still with the palmful of seeds stretched out before him. One after another the chickadees alighted for a magical second; they snatched up a seed and then whirled off. How he loved the touch of their little black feet in that instant of mutual trust!
Paul had taught the chickadees this trick with a patience even he had not known he possessed. Down at the 3end of the hedgerow was a tree house that he and his brother had built last summer. There was rarely anyone to play with when chores were done, so he had spent many hours alone at Hedge House, as he and his brother called their retreat. Sitting in the sunshine on a plank in the treetop, he had taught the chickadees to take seeds from his hand—or perhaps they had taught him to feed them. They knew who filled the feeder; and it hadn’t been very difficult for them to let him know they knew.
The chickadees flew away and Paul headed for Hedge House. He was starting up the ladder when he noticed a small spruce tree standing just before him in the hedgerow. He climbed down and went over to it. It was just about the height he was. Or maybe he was just as tall as it was. Paul liked to think of things in more than one way. The young tree had a first crop of cones in its upper branches and was very nicely shaped. Maybe he should chop it down and take it into the house for a Christmas tree.
But almost as son as the thought that, he did not like the idea any more. The little spruce, the only gren tree in sight, should live here. It could be the Hege house Christmas tree. He would give it a bit of decoration.
He snapped off a dry stalk of milkweed pods and plucked out the fluff that still clung insde each pod. He tossed the fluff, like silvery stars, onto the breeze, spangling the sark branches with bright, feathery milkweed seeds.
He potted a tangle of shining weeds hanging from a leafless shrub and pulled off along coil of them. They were a kind of wild lematis called virgin’s bower. His mother had told him this. Globes of elegant threads spiraled out of the dried flower heads and looked to him like garlands of golden foil. He stepped back. Yes, he liked the effect of the virgin’s bower garlanding his little tree.
He remembered where bushes with red berries were and went to pick them. After he had tucked the short twigs of red into the spruce branches he almost clapped his mittened hands with delight. All the little spruce needed to become a perfect Christmas tree were presents beneath it.
Presents, of course, thought Paul. He picked a dozen goldenrod stems swollen with galls and stuck then upright in a ring around the tree. His father had told t him that a tiny white grub was curled up inside each gall. Downy woodpeckers would open up the galls and eat the insect larvae. Perhaps this was not a convenient place for the woodpeckers to find the galls, but they looked very fine, especially since some were a burnished gold and others were a deep wine-red.
Paul knelt down, scooped an armful of snow from under the tree and patted it into a little platform, where he put the last of the sunflower seeds from his pocket.
He thought a bit and then trudged down the hedgerow to the old apple tree. High in the treetop hung a few apples. He would climb up and get them for the rabbits, whose tracks laced in and out of the raspberry canes that guarded the entrance of Hedge House. He liked the neat way the rabbits had of snipping off the tender ends of the canes with their teeth. Sometimes he found a form, a little hollow in the snow, where a rabbit had spent the night. He liked to think about what the sleeping rabbit might have been dreaming while the stars glittered overhead or snow came down in whispers.
Paul knew the tracks that went straight as an arrow along the edge of the hedgerow were made by a fox. When he saw rabbit tracks separated by great leaps of space and saw a spot of blood and fur on the snow—then he did not like to pretend he was the rabbit. Then it was better to be the fox, who not be hungry that cold night.
The apples seemed very high up in the tree. In his winter clothes it was much harder to climb than it had been last summer. The apples hung on small twigs and looked quite brown and frozen. Were they really worth getting? he wondered. He thought about the many rabbit tracks he had seen under the apple trees and he climbed higher.
Deer liked apples too. How he would like to see a deer! From his perch high up in the apple-tree branches he studied the distant line of trees. There—couldn’t that be the branching antlers of a stag standing in the shadow? It was. No, it wasn’t. Only tree branches, he decided. He was sure that there were animals watching him from the shelter of the trees—weasels and foxes and coyotes—animals he hoped, he knew, were there.
He pocketed a few apples and scrambled down the tree with another idea in his head. Corn. Lots of animals like corn, and he knew that his neighbor had left some corn standing uncut on the other side of the stone wall at the foot of the meadow. He plunged through the thicket and stepped out into cornfield.
A handful of blue jays scolded him and flew away. A line of partridge tracks marched along the row of cornstalks and ended abruptly with a swish of wing-feather marks. Paul had startled the partridge. It was eying him from a hawthorn tree, safely hidden among the tiny blood-red apples and the huge dark thorns.
Several crows flapped by. The blue jays called from the end of the hedgerow. Paul put several ears of corn into his pockets and walked off, humming to himself. “Three calling crows, two screeching jays and partridge in a hawthorn tree.”
He trotted back along the edge of the field toward Hedge House, making one quick detour to climb partway up and ancient basswood tree. He peered down into the darkness of a hole where a limb had long ago been torn away. The hole was a raccoon den. He listened but heard nothing. Do coons ever snore? He wondered. He was sure that a raccoon was asleep in the darkness just a few feet away—inches, maybe. Raccoons loved corn. He considered dropping an ear into the hole to surprise the sleeping coon but thought better of it, slid back down the basswood trunk and made his way to the tree house in the hedgerow.
He climbed the short ladder and sat awhile in the frosty stillness. He swung his feet over the edge of the boards and watched the sun disappear from the sky—blue, gold and pearly pink. The trees at the edge of the field traced delicate designs against the twilight sky. Paul enjoyed the power he sensed in the empty landscape.Wildness the world’s edge fav ge him [eace, a gift of Christmas quiet.
Lights winked on in the neighbors’ barns. A flock of pigeons circled over the barn and the house where Paul lived. Finally the chill that came with the darkness forced him to climb stiffly down the ladder. He stamped warmth back into his toes at the base fo the spruce tree, where he emptied his pockets and laid his final offerings beneath the prickly boughs.
He smiled at his little tree, spangled with milkweed, draped with clematis vines and dotted with berries. Real stars were twinkling overhead. He shut one eye and moved his head until stars appeared to be sitting on the branches of the little spruce. He surveyed with satisfaction the piles of berries, seeds, corn, and withered apples; and he patted the snow wall that held up the ring of goldenrod galls.
His footsteps crunched as he walked back up the hedgerow and on toward home. He cut a few sprigs from a bush that looked like holly to take to his mother. He cut a twig from the butternut tree for brother; he thought that its buds and leaf scar looked like a funny face. He decided to give his father the owls’s fether he had found blowing over the snow.
“Ha,” he sang out in a puff of breath that was white on the cold air. He tried, “Happy.” Another puff. He liked to see his singing.
Hedge House.”
“Ha. Ha. Ha.”
“Holiday.”
Home.
As Paul walked along in the gathering dark he thought about how warm the kitchen would be, and how nice it would smell. Tomorrow he would return to the hedgerow to look at his Christmas tree and see if the animals had taken their presents from beneath it. But now his brother would be home from school, his father would be home from work and he would be glad to see them. He would give them the things he had gathered for them. He would play with the cat. After dinner, in the quiet of the house surrounded by darkness and snow, he and his brother and his mother and father would sit in the lighted kitchen and roll out more Christmas cookies in the shapes of stars and animals and evergreen trees. They would sing Christmas carols, but “Jingle Bells” wouldn’t be among them. THE END.
Marnie Reed Crowell is a biologist who lives on a farm in canton, New York, on the northern edge of the Adirondacks. Her most recent book, “Great Blue,” describes the journey of a heron; it was published in October by Times Books.
A Short Short Story by Marnie Reed Crowell
The icy wind brought tears to his eyes and stung his nose. The books n his knapsack seemed to jab into his back with each step he took. Four more days until Christmas vacation. The whole sixth grade was already acting crazy—even the teachers. Especially the teachers. All the way up the lane from the corner, where the yellow school bus had dropped him off, to the farmhouse, where he lived, Paul kept his head ducked and kicked at the broken crusts of snow.
It was no longer snowing, but the wind had picked ip loose flakes from on top of the old snow and was sending them rolling and bouncing up the hill from the empty cornfield. It laid windrows of snow in the lee of each bare maple tree before whirling off across the lonely meadows.
Paul stamped up the back steps and into the kitchen. He threw down his knapsack and tossed his cap on top of it.
“Did you have a good day?” asked his mother. She was rolling out Christmas cookies at the table in fron t of the window at the other end of the kitchen.
“No. Somebody got paint all over the bookends I’m making for Dad in Shop and we had chorus practice for three straight periods. I’m never going to sing ‘Jingle Bells’ again.
“Where is your brother?” his mother asked, approaching him and tactfully putting a warm cookie in his hand.
“He stayed for pageant rehearsal,” Paul said brusquely, signaling the end of the conversation. His mother turned back to her floured board and rolling pin. She had planned to ask Paul if he wanted to help, but she continued working the cookie dough in silence.
Paul shook the melted snow from his cap and pulled it back on, low over his ears. After giving the cat at his feet a quick rub on the nose, he banged back out the door.
On the back porch, Paul took thelid from the can that held the sunflower seeds for the birds and grinned in spite of himself. A deer mouse looked up at him from the seeds and wiggled its whiskers.
“Thief”, Paul said to himself. Then he changed his mind. Wasn’t it just as good to feed a cute moue as to feed the birds?
“Better watch out for the cat,” Paul muttered as he replaced the lid, taking care to leave it ajar.
He poured a scoopful of seeds into the bird feeder hanging in the crab apple tree and kept a handful to put into his pocket. Then he hurried into the barn. It was cold and dark in there, and had been since they had sold their milk cows. He fed the chickens and soon was on his way out into the freedom of the snowy pastures.
The sun was hanging very low over the bare trees of the hedgerow. The wind had dropped. The hour before the early-winter sunset was often the best hour of the day. Paul strode briskly over the crusty snow. A blue shadow caught his eye. It was a tiny hole in the snow, scarcely bigger than his thumbnail. He squatted and peered in. The entrance to the tiny tunnel was ringed with long blades of grass coated with delicate frost crystals, like the frost from his breath on this parka. Paul figured that the passageway was the right size for a mouse. He knew that meadow mice build snug, round nests of clipped grass and that their runways tunnel under the snow for long distances. He almost never saw any tracks leading to or from the holes. He liked to think that the mice looked out from the holes at night to watch the stars. He ws sure that whatever the mice used the holes for, they really did want them open. A few daysa go he had chopped out a chunk of snow crust with his mittened hand and laid it gently over a hole. He had flagged the spot with a stick. The next day when he came back, the snow boulder had been pushed aside and the tunnel hatch was open once again. Paul would not make extra work for the mice today.
A pair of chickadees buzzed around his head. Another pair was making scolding sounds from the bush ahead of him. They fluttered in front of his s if they were expecting something. Indeed they were. He smiled and pulled off one mitten and took a handful of sound flower seeds out of his pocket. He stood very still with the palmful of seeds stretched out before him. One after another the chickadees alighted for a magical second; they snatched up a seed and then whirled off. How he loved the touch of their little black feet in that instant of mutual trust!
Paul had taught the chickadees this trick with a patience even he had not known he possessed. Down at the 3end of the hedgerow was a tree house that he and his brother had built last summer. There was rarely anyone to play with when chores were done, so he had spent many hours alone at Hedge House, as he and his brother called their retreat. Sitting in the sunshine on a plank in the treetop, he had taught the chickadees to take seeds from his hand—or perhaps they had taught him to feed them. They knew who filled the feeder; and it hadn’t been very difficult for them to let him know they knew.
The chickadees flew away and Paul headed for Hedge House. He was starting up the ladder when he noticed a small spruce tree standing just before him in the hedgerow. He climbed down and went over to it. It was just about the height he was. Or maybe he was just as tall as it was. Paul liked to think of things in more than one way. The young tree had a first crop of cones in its upper branches and was very nicely shaped. Maybe he should chop it down and take it into the house for a Christmas tree.
But almost as son as the thought that, he did not like the idea any more. The little spruce, the only gren tree in sight, should live here. It could be the Hege house Christmas tree. He would give it a bit of decoration.
He snapped off a dry stalk of milkweed pods and plucked out the fluff that still clung insde each pod. He tossed the fluff, like silvery stars, onto the breeze, spangling the sark branches with bright, feathery milkweed seeds.
He potted a tangle of shining weeds hanging from a leafless shrub and pulled off along coil of them. They were a kind of wild lematis called virgin’s bower. His mother had told him this. Globes of elegant threads spiraled out of the dried flower heads and looked to him like garlands of golden foil. He stepped back. Yes, he liked the effect of the virgin’s bower garlanding his little tree.
He remembered where bushes with red berries were and went to pick them. After he had tucked the short twigs of red into the spruce branches he almost clapped his mittened hands with delight. All the little spruce needed to become a perfect Christmas tree were presents beneath it.
Presents, of course, thought Paul. He picked a dozen goldenrod stems swollen with galls and stuck then upright in a ring around the tree. His father had told t him that a tiny white grub was curled up inside each gall. Downy woodpeckers would open up the galls and eat the insect larvae. Perhaps this was not a convenient place for the woodpeckers to find the galls, but they looked very fine, especially since some were a burnished gold and others were a deep wine-red.
Paul knelt down, scooped an armful of snow from under the tree and patted it into a little platform, where he put the last of the sunflower seeds from his pocket.
He thought a bit and then trudged down the hedgerow to the old apple tree. High in the treetop hung a few apples. He would climb up and get them for the rabbits, whose tracks laced in and out of the raspberry canes that guarded the entrance of Hedge House. He liked the neat way the rabbits had of snipping off the tender ends of the canes with their teeth. Sometimes he found a form, a little hollow in the snow, where a rabbit had spent the night. He liked to think about what the sleeping rabbit might have been dreaming while the stars glittered overhead or snow came down in whispers.
Paul knew the tracks that went straight as an arrow along the edge of the hedgerow were made by a fox. When he saw rabbit tracks separated by great leaps of space and saw a spot of blood and fur on the snow—then he did not like to pretend he was the rabbit. Then it was better to be the fox, who not be hungry that cold night.
The apples seemed very high up in the tree. In his winter clothes it was much harder to climb than it had been last summer. The apples hung on small twigs and looked quite brown and frozen. Were they really worth getting? he wondered. He thought about the many rabbit tracks he had seen under the apple trees and he climbed higher.
Deer liked apples too. How he would like to see a deer! From his perch high up in the apple-tree branches he studied the distant line of trees. There—couldn’t that be the branching antlers of a stag standing in the shadow? It was. No, it wasn’t. Only tree branches, he decided. He was sure that there were animals watching him from the shelter of the trees—weasels and foxes and coyotes—animals he hoped, he knew, were there.
He pocketed a few apples and scrambled down the tree with another idea in his head. Corn. Lots of animals like corn, and he knew that his neighbor had left some corn standing uncut on the other side of the stone wall at the foot of the meadow. He plunged through the thicket and stepped out into cornfield.
A handful of blue jays scolded him and flew away. A line of partridge tracks marched along the row of cornstalks and ended abruptly with a swish of wing-feather marks. Paul had startled the partridge. It was eying him from a hawthorn tree, safely hidden among the tiny blood-red apples and the huge dark thorns.
Several crows flapped by. The blue jays called from the end of the hedgerow. Paul put several ears of corn into his pockets and walked off, humming to himself. “Three calling crows, two screeching jays and partridge in a hawthorn tree.”
He trotted back along the edge of the field toward Hedge House, making one quick detour to climb partway up and ancient basswood tree. He peered down into the darkness of a hole where a limb had long ago been torn away. The hole was a raccoon den. He listened but heard nothing. Do coons ever snore? He wondered. He was sure that a raccoon was asleep in the darkness just a few feet away—inches, maybe. Raccoons loved corn. He considered dropping an ear into the hole to surprise the sleeping coon but thought better of it, slid back down the basswood trunk and made his way to the tree house in the hedgerow.
He climbed the short ladder and sat awhile in the frosty stillness. He swung his feet over the edge of the boards and watched the sun disappear from the sky—blue, gold and pearly pink. The trees at the edge of the field traced delicate designs against the twilight sky. Paul enjoyed the power he sensed in the empty landscape.Wildness the world’s edge fav ge him [eace, a gift of Christmas quiet.
Lights winked on in the neighbors’ barns. A flock of pigeons circled over the barn and the house where Paul lived. Finally the chill that came with the darkness forced him to climb stiffly down the ladder. He stamped warmth back into his toes at the base fo the spruce tree, where he emptied his pockets and laid his final offerings beneath the prickly boughs.
He smiled at his little tree, spangled with milkweed, draped with clematis vines and dotted with berries. Real stars were twinkling overhead. He shut one eye and moved his head until stars appeared to be sitting on the branches of the little spruce. He surveyed with satisfaction the piles of berries, seeds, corn, and withered apples; and he patted the snow wall that held up the ring of goldenrod galls.
His footsteps crunched as he walked back up the hedgerow and on toward home. He cut a few sprigs from a bush that looked like holly to take to his mother. He cut a twig from the butternut tree for brother; he thought that its buds and leaf scar looked like a funny face. He decided to give his father the owls’s fether he had found blowing over the snow.
“Ha,” he sang out in a puff of breath that was white on the cold air. He tried, “Happy.” Another puff. He liked to see his singing.
Hedge House.”
“Ha. Ha. Ha.”
“Holiday.”
Home.
As Paul walked along in the gathering dark he thought about how warm the kitchen would be, and how nice it would smell. Tomorrow he would return to the hedgerow to look at his Christmas tree and see if the animals had taken their presents from beneath it. But now his brother would be home from school, his father would be home from work and he would be glad to see them. He would give them the things he had gathered for them. He would play with the cat. After dinner, in the quiet of the house surrounded by darkness and snow, he and his brother and his mother and father would sit in the lighted kitchen and roll out more Christmas cookies in the shapes of stars and animals and evergreen trees. They would sing Christmas carols, but “Jingle Bells” wouldn’t be among them. THE END.
Marnie Reed Crowell is a biologist who lives on a farm in canton, New York, on the northern edge of the Adirondacks. Her most recent book, “Great Blue,” describes the journey of a heron; it was published in October by Times Books.
