Hometown Christmas

When we drove through my hometown for the first time, I asked her, "What do you see?"

And she stared at the setting Ohio sun, at the too cold outside with not enough snow, at the streets I called home.

"Old houses," she said first. "With peeling paint, dead grass for yards. Keep out signs and beware of dogs, rich and modern neighborhoods shoved next to the older ones."

A pause and she looked again. "Bricks. And trees. There's not a yard without a tree here."

"Anything else?" I asked, turn signal pointing me right. Towards home.

"No. Looks like rain though."

"Hm." The turn was made and I relaxed into the wheel. I hated turning. "I'll tell you want I see, yeah?"

"Go ahead."

"These old houses, they hold memories. There are names carved into the wood, finger paint and crayon marks on walls, and whole lives embedded in that chipping paint." The light turned red at the cross road before my old high school's road. I did not look down that road, never will again.

"We keep to ourselves, keep out the people we don't want." I continued driving at green. "Scare them away with dogs we don't have. Scare ourselves with the big new buildings that don't fit in with our common structure, the architecture alien to our town."

"We call the street just down this way," I pointed. "Wall Street. Not it's real name, but only the rich live here and just behind them is everyone else. The cracked paint over cracked bricks, demolished for the white walls to take over."

I pulled down my family's drive. I learned to bike on this drive. "There used to be cornfields and trees here. Dug 'em up for all of those ugly houses."

"There's still so many bricks. So many bricks and trees." We pulled in front of my childhood home, white with a fence and a dog waiting in the front yard. There used to be two waiting when I came home from school.

"I used to climb that tree," I said as we get out of the car and walked toward the gate of my childhood home. "Do you see what I see now?"

It started to rain as we crossed the cobblestones. "Yes," she said, jacket pulled over her head and her hand slipping into mine. "Yes, I do."

She pulled me back before I opened the door. "When we go to mine, I'll tell you everything I see. Everything." She blinked her eyes, wide and big, at me. Her hair was going to crystalize in the wet and the cold.

"Okay," I said, my wet hair beginning to plaster to my face. "I would love that."

"So long as you drive."

"Yes," I laughed as I pushed open the peeling yellow door. "So long as I drive."