I have taken my three pots of geraniums, my small Boojum tree and a willing gnome to visit with a St. Francis statue in a Tucson home that has a courtyard where a fountain gurgles and a black bird, a Phainopepla with a punk hairdo, dips his beak to drink each warm day. Arugula and lettuce still put out flavorful green no matter how much I pick to have with my lunch of Campbell’s bacon and bean soup. On a porch swing I read one book and then another.
Two weeks ago I said, “Please Santa, bring me 40 degree nights and 65 degree days.” For a mere half day drive across the state, that Christmas gift is mine with the use of an old friend’s house in Tucson while he is away for a month.
Each night, four blocks away, crowds of families arrive to stroll through the Winterhaven Festival of Lights, a neighborhood engorgement of front yard electrical color that has been going on each December since 1949. At the dining room table, I hear the tweets of police whistles as traffic is stopped on Fort Lowell Road so the pilgrims can cross in droves. I am not a seeker of crowds, but nevertheless I finish my dinner and join them at dusk. Where people stroll in shorts, I feel overdressed in my Flagstaff-tested hat, gloves and scarf. Children laugh and screech with delight at the corner of Kleindale Road and Forgeus Avenue where a homemade machine launches fresh snow in an arc under a streetlight.
With so many years to compete, these homeowners have invented endless variations on holiday glee. In one yard elephants and giraffes and polar bears stand proud, fashioned from lights. In another yard saber-wielding stormtroopers stand tall against Darth Vader. A dreidel the size of a Fiat 500 dangles between trees turning gently, spinning in slow motion. A plywood life-size Polar Express engine emits steam periodically which causes fathers with strollers to step back surprised. On one block these people looked to me like a variation on shoppers at a mall; down another street I thought, “Sheep.” And then a completely dark house with one small lit-up deer by the driveway captures my heart. How clever, that string of blue lights as mountain stream. And like stars gathered from the sky, those lights sculpted look like a head-down fawn drinking. Charming. I walk on, sweetened.
Then at the end of a dark avenue, I see 15-foot high letters outlined with bright bulbs to make a giant word: BELIEVE.
Believe it is good to come out of your cave though the night is long and winter wants your blood to slow down. Believe the sound of crowds marveling at a two-story glowing blue snow person is a useful antidote to the news bulletins that have interrupted your peace each day. Believe, dear homeowner, that you can push back the dark by lighting up your own personal truth in the front yard each night for weeks. Look, benches to sit on and a screen where someone has selected two dozen Christmas cartoons to project one by one outside the front door. I did not expect to be sitting on a front lawn laughing with strangers at goofy drawings of Santas and reindeer and seasonal cliches, but here I am, relaxed and happy and surprised.
I go to sleep with ease, but after midnight the sound of rain falling stirs me out of dreaming. The flat roof on this house seems to amplify the slap of precip as if I am lying in a large shoebox. I stir awake trying to guess at the hours to sunrise and realize there is a pulsing red light outside. Did the Winterhaven Festival of Lights follow me home? Is that giant Christmas tree nuzzling the window panes? Then I realize it is no longer rain sound outside, but a diesel engine idling. When I open the front door I see a fire truck and an ambulance parked two houses down. They didn’t arrive with sirens. The stretcher that comes out carries a still form wrapped in a white sheet. I don’t see the usual shapes of bent over EMTs monitoring details. It seems, in the morning winter dark, someone has left this life. In a neighborhood where I don’t know the neighbors, I put my hands together and bow my head until I feel the damp cool air stroke my hair. I go back inside, shivering.
Sitting by candlelight, I think of a time when a friend was so bereft at the death of her aged pet rabbit that she couldn’t move toward what to do next. I put her in my truck, then, rabbit in her arms and drove her out of Flagstaff past the road to the ski lifts, the road to Wing Mountain, to another road I knew that wouldn’t be too muddy yet from recent snows. A little way in from the highway where pines and aspens interlaced I parked, and we sat in the quiet until I felt permission to take the rabbit on foot to a place where a large pine snag on the ground seemed to offer a peaceful cave. When I got back to the truck she hesitated, then got out and followed my tracks to the rabbit to say goodbye. That night it snowed again, and standing by separate windows with separate understandings of life, death and love, I wished my friend solace and marveled to think of snowy white flakes falling on furry white out there in the arms of the woods. “Coyote food!” smirked a friend the next day when I described our improvised rabbit burial. Or owl dessert, I thought. BELIEVE. Flesh passes. Bones travel. Snow falls, covering all.
BELIEVE, I think again with a Tucson sunrise gently illuminating the curves of wet clouds against Finger Rock on the crest of the Catalina Mountains. It is not going to last forever, any of it: the children laughing, the families marveling, the bright lights knitted into shapes that cheer. Night falls. Winter deepens. Snow and rain and understandings pass through, blanketing the many shapes of us, one by one. And a deer lowers her head to drink, a breathing flesh and blood being in a forested wild place, or a glowing front-yard gift from a playful imagination. I believe in both, and it is Christmas gift enough to feel able to embrace winter arriving with its ageless variety of darks and lights.
