The Walk

By Lane Harvey Brown

I turned 49 last week. I know this to be true because I’ve had to do the math to remember which mid-40s year was up: 47? 48? 46? Wishful thinking.

It’s almost Christmas and this year it seems to have caught us completely by surprise. The Advent calendar sits bright and ready in the hall, watching as its children – now teenagers – trundle past without a glance on the way to high school each morning. I wonder if it can remember the feel of little fingers working on it the way I can.

The toy catalog comes and goes with only a chuckle about the silly stuff of little kids. Toys R Us has been replaced by big kid diversions: camping gear, clothes, phones. I flip through the American Girl and the Lego catalogs, pausing only briefly on the pages I use to study contentedly just a few years ago. Now I linger over things for college.

Oh I know, there’s no use moping. Every child grows up: Don’t dwell on it! I get that; what I don’t get is how it happened so fast, or how it happens to be me who is here.

Now I hear the quiet in the house differently, when I am home alone. It’s like its own song, one I admit I used to long for at times -- but now I’m not sure I like the tune. And this person – me – whom I have felt so many times like I have lost amid the mothering is about to be face-to-face with more time to get reacquainted than perhaps would be desirable.

So that’s my backdrop today, and yet, a thought strikes me as I am brushing my teeth: that’s the wonder of this time each year when we await one birth so inexplicable, so consequential. We return to the manger, all of us, a little older. Yet this birth never ages. It’s evergreen --

And I think of being very young, walking with my grandfather through the woods near his house in eastern North Carolina, on a cold December morning. Stepping over fallen logs, pressing back fingery evergreen branches with my own small hands, trying to stay by his side.

That’s the image I hold on to in my crowded head. In the rush of stuff we call Christmas, Advent is where I step outside.

The air is cold and fresh on my face. I step off into the woods at the end of the busy road. It wakes me up, and my cheeks cool from fury of the festivities. This forest is a house of stillness, spare, wonderful, real. If it were night, I could see the canopy of stars stretched across the open fingers of trees.

I look around slowly, trying to memorize this moment, the fullness of this quiet –

The feeling that I am never alone. That’s the promise of this time of year to me, and I know it to be true, as sure as I could feel those branches in my child-sized hands. My heart knows it, but I also see it, watching this season’s waddling toddlers, who will soon play pick-up football at the park across the street. Someday, maybe there will be kids there who come back to my house, a
new generation.

Life’s all changing, all the time, before us, after us, all around us. Yet for these spare weeks as fall opens the door to winter, we invite inside with it a hope that it will all continue, evergreen. And for me, right now this year, that’s very reassuring.