Life in the Cheese Drawer

I drive home every night from work after 8 p.m. through residential areas, and many houses are lit up with lights – blinking, white, colored, shaped into deer – you name it, it’s out there. And every night as I drive home, I wish I could just force myself out of the house after dark and drive around to look at the lights.
When we lived in Austin, often during the month of December, my dad would take me or me and one, two, or all of my siblings on a drive through town to look at the lights that people had put up. My mom wouldn’t necessarily come with; sometimes she would be there, other times it would be just my dad and a couple of his kids.
One particular time I remember going to Rochester to look at lights. For some reason, Rochester seemed a lot farther away than it actually was – it was only 30 miles from Austin, on a freeway no less, but it always seemed like two hours to get there.
My aunts Colettie and Kathleen were with, and Liz might have been with also. We first drove downtown, where all the deciduous trees had white twinkle lights strewn through their branches, something I had never seen before. Lights were made for pines, right? Apparently someone was thinking outside the box…or triangular branches, as it were. Even today when I see lights on smallish maples and other leafy trees, I think of that first time I saw them downtown in Rochester.
Then we drove through the “rich” neighborhoods, pausing at each house as the lights reflected in our eyes. Cul-de-sac after cul-de-sac, we drove in circles looking at all the lights the owners had put out for others’ enjoyment. 20-foot pines with colored lights up to the top, each window and eve lined in small lights, green and red lights winding up pillars that held up porch roofs. I couldn’t get enough.
But the best was yet to come. After we had exhausted ourselves looking at lights, and Lizzie was snoozing in the back seat, my dad pulled over in one of Rochester’s parks and pulled out a thermos filled with hot cocoa. I held my styrofoam cup in my hands and watched the Christmas lights in the distance across the lake, distorted by the steam from my cocoa. It really was the perfect evening trip. Contentment defined.

When I was four years old, my family moved to Houston for the winter months because it would be a shorter commute for my mom to her work (which was two hours from our house). From what I remember, the apartment we rented was an upper level, two-bedroom place. The kitchen was small with an adjacent dining area that looked out over the street. The living room was also small and I think we just had our couch and TV brought over from Austin.
There are things I specifically remember about living in Houston. I watched The Wizard of Oz for the first time in that apartment. I tried to slide down a wooden pole at the park and got a huge sliver that ran diagonally across my hand. I made a snowman and called him Frosty (sans hat, but oh well). I cut the electrical cord to a lamp that sat next to my bed and nearly shorted out the house, then blamed it on the invisible man (my real imaginary friend, China, had long since been dead, gone in a tragic car accident).
And I remember being particularly concerned about whether or not Santa would find me that Christmas. For the holidays we were going to be staying at the finished apartment that resided in half of my aunt Kathleen and uncle George’s garage.
How would Santa find me? We weren’t in our regular house, and we weren’t at our temporary home. We were in some apartment in the middle of nowhere. How on earth would Santa know where I was? I was stymied.
Well, mom, being the wise woman she is, told me that Santa would surely find the way to where I was. I’m sure I asked a million times if she was sure, and how could she be sure, and was she sure?
Needless to say, Santa found his way to where I was. I remember falling asleep that night after leaving out milk and cookies, and still wondering if Rudolph might get lost on his way here, and then waking up late night/early morning and seeing a dollhouse sitting on the floor with a light shining through it, making it luminously pink. He had come! He found me! I was happy, and I went back to sleep and pretended I hadn’t seen it when morning came.
(On another note, it also snowed a bucketload Christmas eve, and the bed my parents slept in was right next to a sliding glass patio door, which for some reason didn’t shut flush with the wall, so when my mom woke up, there was a foot of snow next to her side of the bed. Fun stuff indeed.)