I looked out the door to see if it had snowed yet, caught unawares by the clenching bite of winter. The early morning sky had a thin, washed-out look to it, but there was no snow.
Grandpa followed me onto the porch. He turned his face up and sniffed the air. “Smells like it’s gonna snow,” he said, sniffing another time or two.
“What does gonna snow smell like?”
“Well, you tell me.”
I wrinkled my nose and inhaled a little.
Grandpa took a deep breath. “Hard to describe, but there’s something different about it. Brings to mind the skin of a green apple.”
I tried it again, sucking my lungs full of the icy air and holding it until the cold forced it out of me in one big whoosh.
“Takes some doing, but you’ll get the hang of it.”
The cold clamped down inside my head for a few paralyzing seconds.
“Careful now, you don’t want to get your brain froze up,” Grandpa said, stuffing the legs of my snowsuit into Vonnie’s outgrown galoshes.
The pine tree I wanted was too tall, and the one Grandpa picked was too short. He held his arm straight up in the air to show me how tall it could be. We looked until we found one that went just past his fingertips. Grandpa reckoned it would do. He cut it down and dragged it to the car. When we got home, we put the tree in the sitting room off the guest bedroom because it stayed chilly in there, putting the scraggly side to the back when we placed it on the stand.
Grandpa turned the tree another inch or so to the right and looked over at Grandma, who nodded approval. “Most everything’s got two sides to it,” she said, glancing sidewise to see if I was paying attention. “Make sure it’s your good side you’re showing to the world. Put your best foot forward.”
“Yes ma’am,” I said.
Grandma sat down, ready to pare another pan of the Golden Delicious apples I’d picked up from Sissy’s yard, looking for recently fallen ones. The ground lay covered with rotting apples, most of them buzzing with crazed honey bees drunk on the fermenting fruit. We didn’t have Golden Delicious apples because Grandma said they went bad too quick, but we had Jonathans and Winesaps and a sweet, hard-fleshed yellow apple that had dark freckles on the peel, but I didn’t know the name of that one.
The apple turned in her hand as the knife, honed on Grandpa’s razor strop, skimmed just under the gold skin. Vonnie and I watched the peel reel out in an unbroken curl that pooled on the floor at our feet. Before she could get to it, I snatched it up and threw it over my shoulder. Holding my hands over my eyes, I peeked through my fingers to see how it landed.
It was plain as day. A perfect S.
“That means you’re going to marry Grant Slack,” Vonnie said.
“Am not. He doesn’t even like me.”
“Then I reckon he’ll just have to get used to you. Or it could be Steve Bibb. But no, it has to be the last name that starts with an S,” she said, making up that rule as she went.
And so it was decided. I was to marry dark-haired and dreamy Grant Slack.
At least until I threw another apple peel.
Grandma said her mother’s apple peels were so thin you could read a newspaper through them. I never thought to test Grandma’s, but I’m sure they came close. It was a matter of pride not to leave a layer of apple flesh on the peel because that would be considered wasteful. Waste not, want not, is what Grandma always said.
Vonnie and I decorated the tree with delicate pearl beads strung on fine wire in the shape of crosses and stars, ornaments brought over by Grandpa’s German forefathers and passed on to him by his mother, Sarah Ellen Wiseman, who died in our spare bedroom when I was too little to remember. The angel on top of the tree had no legs, but a cardboard tube under her white satin dress fit over the tiptop branch. Along with the big family Bible, the nativity scene was set up on the library table next to a stand that held a Webster’s unabridged dictionary almost as big as me.
Grandma let me and Vonnie help her make gingerbread men with raisin eyes and molasses cookies sparkled with sugar. We packed some of the cookies in a box of popped corn addressed to Mother and Aunt Lila in New York, and sent another big box addressed to “USA ARMED FORCES OVERSEAS.”
Grandpa said he’d do his part by helping us eat the rest.
My mother couldn’t come home for Christmas because President Roosevelt needed her to stay in New York and build airplanes for the War.
A big box waited at the post office. Grandpa pulled me there in my red wagon, but the box rode in my place on the way home. When I opened it Christmas morning, it was full of presents wrapped in red-striped paper, each with a candy cane on top.
All except two of the presents were from Santa. There was a china-faced doll with eyes that clicked open when you picked her up, a blue-plaid skirt with pleats and a fuzzy angora sweater to match, a set of watercolors in a tin container, new underpants with the days of the week embroidered on them, flannel pajamas with feet, a set of books with pictures and stories, and a wooden puzzle map of the United States. I named the new doll Iva Kathleen after my mother and placed her in a dresser drawer with several other fancy dolls that she and Aunt Lila had sent from New York. They were
