Day 223 - Memories
I have no idea what your childhood was like. But I imagine that the same thing is true for all of us. We, the world, get introspective this time of year.
I think it’s mid-summer for the Southern Hemisphere, or pretty near, so maybe their frolicking at the beach this week, but if you are anything like me, memories from childhood are swarming and painting each of your choices. So, I’m going for a swim in mine today. Really let the season sink in.
I grew up in the country. I didn’t think of it that way at the time. I was near a highway and coffee shop. I felt culture knocking at my door of desire every day. But now, looking back, I lived in the country. Plain and simple.
The year I turned thirteen I remember vividly. I could walk to work in under an hour if I cut through the State Park. If I stuck to the highway it was just over an hour on foot. I worked Season help at a little store named after one of my favorites books as a kid, The Secret Garden.
- yummy
The store was on a special plot of land on the East side of Highway Twelve between Verano and Glen Ellen. In the very back of the lot was a new, custom home built by the property owners, a husband and wife team with two daughters and a penchant for service. There was an Auto Shop, a Diner, managed by the father, and this specialty knickknack store, managed by the mother. Year round the shop was stocked with high quality trinkets and collectibles that visitors to the Wine Country would cherish and bring back to their various parts of the globe. The store was a converted house.
During the Holidays it was a winter wonderland of Holiday goodies, steeped in the scent of mulled wine and hot cider, trimmed with silver and gold, decked with gnomes and elves and fairies of all sizes. People smiled just at the thought of the place. I felt five years old in that store. Every day.
It was five or six converted rooms filled with clay models, hand painted; gift cards and music boxes lining every shelf. Rudolf and the reindeer had a room, and the snowman’s corner was very popular. St. Nick’s from around the world were interspersed around the shop, rosy cheeked and tall with bags empty after a long night’s work. There was as set of hand blown glass ornaments, long before designer collectible ornaments were a thing.
The Holidays were so available in that store. There was nothing like it for miles. The floor creaked when you walked through the low door from the front room to the register room and I’d recommend people, “watch your step,” when we crossed that threshold. People would come in from the rain and the store would reach capacity, locals telling stories and visitors gasping after finding that perfect something they could never have gotten anywhere else.
I would wake up before the sun came over the hills and put on my Holiday wool, my galoshes and my yellow rubber rain coat. With my flashlight and a bag of snacks I’d step into the crisp holly-soaked air. I’d cut through the neighbors yard across the street and hop their fence, heading over the bridge at the center of town. I’d look for the driest leaf I could find and drop it into the rushing eddies of the creek below, up at least fourteen feet since Fall and just two feet below the bridge. It was a one-lane concrete affair and when it flooded, most of town backed up in tourist traffic.
Headed past the barber shop and the second hand store, I’d hop another fence into the State Park. Usually I could put the flashlight away at this point and trade if for my snacks. I’d wait until the walk home to splash and play in mud. I didn’t want to spend a day wet in the store. Customers and muddy wool don’t mix.
There were three trees I’d watch out for on the hike. One had grown contrary to gravity. It’s trunk drooped becoming a beckoning park bench where many bottoms had smoothed it of bark. This marked the first third of the journey. The second tree was really two who had grown together in an unusual way. They marked a sharp turn in the path just before cresting a hill and opening on a view of the vineyards between Glen Ellen and Kenwood. Some mornings the fog would roll in just before the sun came up looking like gilded glaciers of stampeding sheep slipping down the hills of the opposite valley wall.
- daybreak
And the third tree I’d watch for was a thatch of Manzanita, the first of its kind at that elevation. Higher up, on the hill behind my house were hundreds of these, but on this trail, walked by so many of our neighbors, this little thatch was all there was in the park. The park itself was maybe ten acres from town to the store. From the thatch you could see the Highway and just across that was the Auto Shop, Diner and Gift Store. Sometimes the little chimney would already be spurting plumes of oaky smoke into the morning. The store, draped in rows of grapevines bare of the rich auburn leaves autumn had worked so hard to achieve, now just branches and twigs, stood sentinal into the breathfilled morning light.
Inevitably, when I’d get to work the sun would be up.
The last half-mile was always my favorite and I would jog down the drive of the park across a soft meadow. Inside my galoshes were my shoes for the day. Under my yellow rubber raincoat was my Holiday outfit I wore every day. I’d arrive early enough to help “Open” the store. I’d arrange the porch area with an array of welcoming characters. I picked the ones that looked cold, as if to say to each visitor, “Yes, we know it is cold out here, come inside as quick as you can. We’ll keep you warm, as long as you like.”
I set the music to play. Back then it was long playing vinyl records, stacked on an automatic player. Every three hours I’d return and flip the stack, listening to the B-sides in opposite order, and then switching the stack to the next carefully selected range of Burl Ives and Danny Kay carols from the day.
I could go on. And clearly, I can go back, any time I like, in my memory. Today, I want to find a little store like that one, which has been gone for years now, and I want to buy everything they have. I want to have every single item in the store gift-wrapped and piled into the back of every car that pulls up to it today.
Send them home amazed and smiling with a station wagon full of unopened surprises and treats for their loved ones. I want to gift wrap a little corner of every great winter memory from my childhood and hand it off to the people who have a space in their heart already waiting for this little trinket of joy.
I want to hike along the Holiday trail with the happiest and most childlike of each of you and soak up the memories of sharing cheer, sipping sweet hot marshmallowed drinks, and feeling the warmth of a blazing fireplace. Essentially, today’s money is going to make a bunch of people’s celebrations feel like it did, way back when; when we was kids.