Dear Friends,

I wanted to give you something for Christmas. Something free and different.

Yes, yes. I know that everything on this website is free (okay, well, if you click the links to my books you’ll see that the books aren’t free). And the Advent readings are certainly free. But they aren’t different.

Okay, maybe they are different. I don’t know.

I’m starting over.

Dear Friends,

I have a Christmas present for you. And this is for you even if you don’t celebrate Christmas, don’t get Christmas, or even if you are a Bah Humbug kind of person.

I hope you’re not. But still.

This is a Christmas present for everyone: adult and child alike, solitary or in company, at home or away. It’s for anyone who likes words and even for people who don’t realize they do (one of my not-so-secret aims is to show you that you do like words, that you actually love them–did you know?). It’s a gift of something simple, brief, and lovely. Something you can enjoy once or again. Something that will make you think and imagine or that you can turn your mind off to and just let the words come– as they will, as they want to.

(Well-aligned words are Such Lovely Things, don’t you think so?)

Here’s the gift: I’ve read aloud and recorded something Favorite of mine, and I’m inviting you to listen.

What is it? It’s a short story. No. A poem. No. A Memory and a Conversation, a look over the shoulder, a Christmas or ten of them heaped up and then unspooled in a glorious line of words.

It’s Dylan Thomas’s A Child’s Christmas in Wales.

Who is Dylan Thomas? Dylan Thomas was a Welshman and a poet. He lived a short, loud and inebriated life, and he loved Christmas. He loved his memories of Christmas, anyway–the Christmases he had known when he was a child in (you guessed it) Wales.

He wrote A Child’s Christmas in Wales, and the work is certainly a testament to his love for and fond memory of his childhood Christmases. Well, whether or not he actually loved these memories is, I suppose, up to question, as he died in 1953. We cannot ask him. But this bit of prose certainly suggests that he loved those Christmases Past and snow and Wales in the snow.

Any work of literature mustered up in love is worth something, isn’t it? Add to that Thomas’s adjectives, his specificity, his brilliant and tempered use of alliteration; include his evocation of the child-mind, so richly done in this text; his appreciation of postmen; his love of mystery; his brilliant description of uncles (“there are always uncles at Christmas”) and aunts.

It’s so so good.

And it might be difficult to follow. So allow me to explain that this is a memory, and memories come as they will, right? Often memories lead to other memories in ways that make sense to our minds at the time but that, written out, might be confusing to the one who is following along.

Know that this is what is happening here: someone is remembering his childhood Christmases, and he is doing so in the aggregate: all-in-a-heap. One thought of Christmas past leads to another, and just when you are really and truly settling in to this stream-of-consciousness, you realize that he is now relating these Christmases to someone else–likely a child.

In fact, the way that this narrative becomes a conversation makes one wonder if Thomas is himself one of the uncles he mentions who has been dozing (and remembering) in front of a Christmas fire, and then has been interrupted by a niece or nephew and so begins telling them what he has been reliving in his mind.

It’s wonderful.

And, as I said, it’s for everyone. For people who began their holiday celebrations last night with Hanukah. For people who have never heard of Christmas. For people who celebrate Christmas in the summertime, never with snow. It’s for you and your children, for your baby who can barely crawl. For your great-aunt who might even now be “teetering at the sideboard.” For the uncles who are on their way to your house for the holidays.

Why is it for everyone? Because it’s beautiful–and beauty is for Everyone, most especially at Christmas.

So where is it? See below. Download and enjoy.

Merry Christmas!

With Great Joy,

Rebecca

click here to download

The post A Merry Christmas Gift for You: A Child’s Christmas in Wales appeared first on Rebecca Brewster Stevenson.

I think they lived there for a little more than a decade. By the time I was six, they had sold it. They had their apartment in the city and the house where my parents live now, the one we return to every summer, the one “Out East,” we say, at the almost very end of Long Island.

But some of my earliest memories are from the Stony Brook House, and although the image in the email was merely a floor plan, just a map drawn up in pencil, I recognized each room immediately.

I was alone in my house when I saw it, but I think I gasped aloud. I looked down at a two-dimension drawing on the flat screen of my cell phone, but what I saw somehow was the full house, upright, entire. Room for room, closet, bathroom, window. The yard, the front porch, the smell of the boxwood out front, and the way the sunlight came into the rooms.

***

Lisa grew up just outside of D.C. Her house was a split level with columns across the front on a lot marked with grand old trees. She moved there with her family when she was two and called that house home through her college years. Now in her early forties, she and her siblings last year completed a difficult if not-uncommon task: they helped their aging parents sort through a lifetime of things, gather up what they needed, and move closer to family.

The house quickly sold to some people from Boston. They bought it without seeing it first-hand, via website and an obliging realtor. It fetched an excellent price.

Recently, Lisa told me she’d had news of her childhood home: it’s gone. They razed it. Not just the house, but the entire property: the trees and all the grass. So it wasn’t the house the buyers were after, apparently. It was the lot.

That is, of course, their prerogative.

But just yesterday, Lisa mentioned it to me again in passing. Just a quick comment that opened a view onto loss. “I’ve known the house is gone for a month now,” she said. And she has a full life here in North Carolina: a lovely home of her own, a thriving marriage, three beautiful children. But the empty lot reported by her sister is nonetheless on her mind. “I’ve known the house is gone for a month now,” she said. “I’m still sad.”

***

My sister and her husband have a large old house in the country in western Massachusetts. It’s set back from the road; you have to know where to look, when passing, to see one ivory peak under the roof and a window next to the chimney.

It was built in 1922 and is quietly grand: warm wood floors; glass doorknobs; built-in bookcases and a broad staircase, with landing, that descends into a generous center hall.

It has a second staircase that goes to what might have been servants’ quarters, but if the house ever enjoyed that kind of exalted service, it’s long lost to memory. My sister and her husband bought the house nearly ten years ago from a widow who had lived there alone for a long time.

But one afternoon, not long after they moved in, my sister found herself with smiling and unexpected guests in the driveway. It was a woman with her grown daughter, and the woman explained that she had grown up in that house, perhaps forty years before.

Together they walked through the rooms, the woman recalling to her daughter and my sister how her family had lived in those spaces. This had been her brother’s room; here they had done their homework. Her mother had the sewing machine in this room, and they would talk together while they did their school work and she sewed. And on Christmas mornings, she and her siblings stood like this on the staircase, waiting for their parents to call them into the living room, with the fireplace blazing to warm the room, to the Christmas tree and the presents.

***

The news this morning is of fires continuing to rage in California. With no rain in sight and a persistent dry heat, the fires have progressed, at times, to consume the length of three football fields in a minute.

The path of these fires is indiscriminate. Houses, streets, wineries, strip-malls– they eat through everything, and their wake is charred shells of places, barely recognizable rubbish. One can identify remains because of where they are, not what.

The damage from a hurricane is different: belongings disappear completely or are found the length of a football field away. In its rage, a hurricane trashes things, hurls them, twists rain gutter and rebar alike.

We have had too much of this kind of thing lately. And the news is of the loss of life and property, of businesses undone. Of the incalculable costs and where to turn for recompense or justice. Of fear and failed infrastructure and climate change, of when and where this will happen again.

***

Of course in all instances like these, the loss of life is the most terrible of the losses.

But in my privileged and safe distance (this time) from disaster, I find myself caught on the loss of homes. Be it trailer, apartment, or warm wood floors and columns out front, a home is a shelter from the elements. The place to come in from the wind and rain, a filter for light and weather.

At its best, a home is also a filter for everything outside. It’s a space where one can be still and can be oneself unmolested, where one can comfortably consider what it means to be alive in the world even while enjoying a little distance from it.

I know that not everyone has a home, and that not every home is safe.

But a home should always be someplace safe. And it should never be snatched indiscriminately from the landscape.

***

Waiting at the traffic light, Emma and I saw them emerge from the house: the boy, maybe seven; his sister, five. Both with their heads down, their sandy brown hair drifting at their ears, the napes of their necks. He descended first, and she followed with their mother, and each of the children wore backpacks.

The steps to their house are concrete and slathered in leaves. Their window blind was closed crookedly, and a bluebird house sat askew on the tree next to their front walk.

They live in one of those charming old neighborhoods that has recently been rediscovered in Durham, and as we drove away I wondered if those children knew that. I thought of their backpacks and their mother, of the school-day awaiting them both. Of the bluebird house and the window-blind and maybe the lunches inside their backpacks.

I am glad to think that the up-and-coming-ness of their neighborhood– for now, anyway– probably makes no difference to them at all.

***

We have an empty bedroom in our house. Will won’t be coming back to it, as he got married in July. And Everett is gone for six months, on the travel portion of his gap year.

The boys shared that room for fourteen years, and it looks pretty much the way it did when they slept there every night, except that, for now anyway, there are no clothes lying–clean or dirty–on the floor.

Many times as I walk past that room, I think how glad I am of where they are now, that they have left us and are on their own doing brave, interesting, meaningful things.

But more often, I think of a single afternoon –which may have happened just as I recall it, or it may be an amalgam of many:

It is late spring or early fall. Their sister is upstairs sleeping. They are eight and six, or seven and five, and the Legos are spilled around them on the floor. The sun is shining through the windows and they are playing in it.

All they know is the Legos and perhaps Star Wars and, in a peripheral and obvious way, each other. They don’t know the sunlight, they don’t know the carpet or the bunk-beds, the desk or the dresser, because these things are just as they should be.

And their mother is nearby somewhere. Upstairs, probably. It doesn’t matter. They don’t know that she is standing there, just for a quick minute, to watch her sons playing in the sunlight on the floor.

The post Home appeared first on Rebecca Brewster Stevenson.

We are Always Too Late

Memory
Is in two parts.

First the re-visiting:

the way even now I can see
those lovers at the café table. She is weeping.

It is New England, breakfast time, winter. Behind her,
outside the picture window, is
a stand of white pines.

New snow falls and the old,
losing its balance in the branches,
showers down,
adding fractions to it. Then

The re-enactment. Always that.
I am getting up, pushing away
coffee. Always I am going towards her.

The flush and scald is
to her forehead now, and back down to her neck.

I raise one hand. I am pointing to
those trees, I am showing her our need for these
beautiful upstagings of
what we suffer by
what survives. And she never even sees me.

Eavan Boland

The post Too Late appeared first on Rebecca Brewster Stevenson.

— William Wordsworth, The Two-Part Prelude of 1799

The post On Memory appeared first on Rebecca Brewster Stevenson.