The Christmas My Street Trimmed My Tree

The front room

I was not touched, not yet. I was frightened. Fourteen cars on a quiet street means a death, in my experience, or a funeral lunch, and for about half a minute I sat there convinced that someone I loved had died and everybody had gathered at my house to wait for me.

Then I saw the wreath on my front door. I did not own a wreath.

I got out of the car. Up and down the eaves of my house, along the gutters and over the bay window, there were strings of the big old bulbs, the heavy kind with the fat colored glass. They weren’t lit. Somebody had wrapped each porch post from the bottom to the top in slow, even spirals.

Hattie’s snowflake was still taped to the inside of the storm door.

The inside door was not locked. I had locked it when I left. The knob was warm from somebody’s hand.

I stood on my own porch and I heard it, on the other side of the door. Thirty people, standing perfectly still. You don’t realize how loud a roomful of people is until you hear one holding its breath.

I opened the door.

The first thing that hit me was the smell, which I had not smelled in a year. Balsam and cold air and sap, and under it, coffee and hot pasties from somebody’s oven in my kitchen. The second thing was the people. They stood along the walls of my front room and down the hall and into the dining room, in their church clothes and their work coats, and not one of them said a word. I’ll say that again because it matters. Nobody shouted, nobody said surprise, nobody sang. Bev Kittleson had her hand pressed over her own mouth. Delmar had a handsaw in his fist and sawdust on his knees.

And in the front window, where a clothespin had held my drapes shut for three months, stood a tree.

It was jammed against my ceiling, its top bent flat against the plaster like a thumb, and it was trimmed from the floor to the tip. Every one of my glass birds. The tin star was on the very top, and it was crooked. Forty years of salt dough handprints. The paper chain. The pipe-cleaner angel with one wing, hung at eye level with the wing side turned to the wall, as if somebody had noticed.

The lights were on the tree, in slow spirals from the bottom to the top. They were not lit.

What I felt was anger. It came up in me hot and fast and out of nowhere, and I am ashamed of it, and I’m going to tell you about it anyway. I looked at my tree in my window with my mother’s birds hanging on it, and what I thought was, That was his.

“Who went in my basement?” I said.

It came out sharp. A woman I did not recognize said that, with my voice. A couple of the children flinched.

Bev took half a step. “Dot, we can go. If you want us to go, we’ll all go right now. I mean it. Just say.”

“That was his,” I said. “That was his job. He did the lights. He did the tree. You don’t just come into a house and…”

I couldn’t finish. I could not see the end of the sentence.

Nobody said a thing. And then Marv Schaller came forward from the corner by the hearth.