Four Flashlights in the Back Pasture

Four Christmases

Grady’s father and I divorced when Grady was five. It was nobody’s villain story. We married young, and we wanted different lives. He works in the oil field in North Dakota now, two weeks on and one week off, and he calls Grady every Sunday without fail.

On Christmas Eve he called at three, before church, to say Merry Christmas.

That first Christmas after the divorce, Grady and I drove out to my parents’ farm outside Durand the same as always.

My folks, Glen and Shirley Paulsen, have farmed the same 300 acres since before I was born. Corn, beans, hay, and about forty head of beef cows since they sold the milk cows.

My brother Steve and his wife Jill came with the girls. Jill is a list person. Every November she texts my mother a list for each girl, with links and sizes and colors, and my mother, who hates shopping, buys straight down the list.

I never sent a list. That first year I could barely get through a week without crying in the car, and the last thing I wanted was to ask my parents for anything.

I was thirty-two, renting a duplex in Menomonie, keeping the Jorgenson name so Grady and I would match. I was going to stand on my own feet.

So Avery and Lily opened everything on their lists, and Grady opened a flashlight. My mother said, “We weren’t sure what to get a boy.”

Grady, who was five, thought the flashlight was wonderful. He slept with it under his pillow for a month.

The second year, the girls opened about the same, and Grady opened another flashlight. A different brand, a little bigger.

My mother said, “He liked the last one so much.” I said nothing in the house. I waited until we were out in the yard loading the car.

“Mom,” I said, by the trunk, “the girls got about six hundred dollars of presents apiece. Grady got fifteen.”

She looked honestly surprised, which is the worst part. “Amy, boys don’t care about that kind of thing,” she said.

“He’s happy with a flashlight. Look at him.” And Grady was happy, running around the yard shining it at the cows.

The third year I didn’t say anything at all. I watched the girls open their lists and I watched Grady open flashlight number three, and I drove home with my jaw tight and my son singing in the back seat.

I want to be fair to my parents here, because they are not cruel people. They are tired people. Dad is sixty-six and still does every chore himself, and Mom, at sixty-four, has bad knees. A list makes a chore easy.

They also told themselves a story, the way all of us do. Jill asks, so Jill’s girls must care. Amy never asks, so Amy’s boy must not.

It was easier to believe Grady didn’t care than to drive to Eau Claire and walk a toy aisle and guess.

Why I Didn’t Just Stay Home

People have asked me why I didn’t just keep Grady home on Christmas Eve, or call my mother and have it out with her.

The answer is simple. They are my parents, and Grady loves that farm more than any place on earth.

He rides in the tractor cab with my dad. He knows every cow by her ear tag. He thinks the haymow is the best room ever built.

I was not going to take that away from him over money. That would have punished Grady for something my parents did.

And a phone call would have gotten me an apology for the wrong thing and no change in what mattered.

What I decided, sometime in October, was that I would stop arguing about what Grady got from them.

I would give him the best night of his life, and I would give it to him on their own ground, where they could see it.

And truthfully, it was not even my idea. It was Grady’s.

Last January his Scout pack held a winter campout at a county park near Menomonie. The leaders had a gear list and a safety talk and a rule that every kid sleeps with a parent.

Grady and I slept in a borrowed tent on a night that went down to six degrees.

He loved it more than anything I have ever seen him love.

He checked out every library book on winter camping, then every book on knots, and then a book on codes and signals.

In October, sitting at the counter doing his math homework, he looked up at me and asked one question.

“Can we camp at Grandpa’s on Christmas Eve? Out back, by the fire pit? I’ll bring all my flashlights.”

He was not trying to make a point. He did not know there was a point to make.

I said yes before I had thought it through. Then I thought it through, and I said yes again.