NE CHRISTMAS was quite like the others in those years in our town well outside of Boston our town that was much like the other towns outside of Boston But they must not have been ordinary or unimportant those Christmases since all these years later I see something hovering in darkness as I am falling asleep in December that forces me to ask Did it snow two feet when I was ten or ten feet when I was two and if it is the latter case did my parents simply tell me about it since I could not really know it for myself What do I remember and what is imagined All the Christmases roll down to visions of snow or hoped-for snow and to lights Where did you live my young daughter asks We lived early on in West Chelmsford where most of the houses including ours were snug against the street which was called Main Street but saw no traffic They were so close to the road because they had been built so very long ago before our country was a country and the posts for hitching horses were still standing here and there Behind the houses were expanses of land in front nothing in back everything and back there we had in warmer weather forest poison ivy grapes that one year we harvested and drained in cheesecloth sacks dripping to make grape jelly and once a bobcat A young bobcat cried and screeched each night for a week and its presence was news enough for the Lowell newspaper That made us proud our local bobcat in the Lowell Sun The bobcat didn’t scare me I’m surprised to say it excited me It was like a nightly fireworks show expected and fun Human forces unknown trapped and probably killed the bobcat no doubt working under cover of darkness Those who were in authority did not transport and release animals back then Suddenly in any event the bobcat was gone The nights were quiet again quiet star-filled nights 5
In the West Chelmsford house and particularly in the bedroom that Kevin and I shared everything was angles It was a tight house every inch useful We all got along Mom Dad Kevin myself and so the compact nature of our old house was fine I cannot recall our main room precisely except to remember it as small and warm warm despite the lack of a fireplace a hearth built in centuries past had long ago been bricked in but I can see the tree It was a giant tree nearly as big as my father who stood six feet tall Eventually ages six and four my brother and I were able to assist in trimming the tree The lights were multicolored but most of the lights did not interest us The bubblers did There was liquid of some sort probably poisonous in their slim glass fluorescences the fluid was warmed electrically beneath in an attached bowl then started to bubble up How many house fires were ignited by bubblers will never be known and buying a bubbler today is probably as illicit an act as buying a Roman candle But my father loved bubblers my mother allowed them and for Kevin and me They were the only lights that mattered Except for the lights of the monastery There was a monastery not far away I think it was in Tyngsboro or Hudson and the Jesuit brothers living there must have worked very hard with huge ladders or the church must have had much more money for maintenance than it does today because the immense stolid brick building was decorated to a sensational brilliance each December We would drive through North Chelmsford in the Mercury and out onto the road by the Merrimack River and then find the monastery tucked away in the woods a monastery that went ignored by all but the monks for eleven months a year It seemed to me a magic monastery hidden in the forest and unseeable from January to November and then made manifest as if by a miracle each December It wasn’t and then it was 6
My father belonged to a Catholic business group that raised money to benefit the brothers I knew that much about the monastery This civic association had a French name Maybe that money helped with the lights I knew nothing else about the relationship of brothers to fathers to nuns and cared only about the lights which were again multicolored 7
