by Maria Hetherton
Early winter, 2020. I’d cycle most mornings past landmarks of a contentious election season. Like a cross and two jauntily tipped AR-15s embossed onto an American flag. And across the road, a succession of placards,
Blessed are the peacemakers
For they shall be called
Children of God,
swayed backwards after all of the pushing down and pulling back up.
We’d expected my brother and his family at Christmas with cautious optimism, yielding as late as possible to the reality of travel in the time of pandemic. Disappointed,
we maundered on, my husband and I, California transplants living our second year in the real winter, high desert climate of northern New Mexico.
We assembled our forty-eight inch Christmas tree; hung ornaments from Acoma pueblo; placed beneath it clay nativity figures, halos chipped amid bad antics of a cat, Joseph’s head reattached with super glue. We lined the livestock fence in front of our house with yellow lights, and tossed colored bulbs across massive mounds of sage. We leaned in to long, dark nights.
Our next-door neighbors, masked, in Santa hats, cheered us with cookies the week before Christmas. Liana, age three, held out the small tin, gift of a tiny magi.
“Your lights are amazing!” we told them.
“Yours, too!” they replied.
Winter of 2020, everyone’s lights were amazing. It was like we lived in Whoville. Every house in our corner of the village got lit: lights bordering roofs, illuminated snowmen on lawns, lights strung from poles to resemble Christmas trees. Some houses adopted color schemes, blue-and-white or neon pink with turquoise. Some relied on laser projections drifting snowflakes onto house facades and horse corrals.
It was almost enough to make you forget the isolation of the past nine months, or that someone could press words of peace into a ditch at the side of the road. It recalled sad childhood holidays haunted by our father’s war trauma, front-line combat in a Belgian forest, Christmas of 1944. My brother and I would admire our neighbors’ lights, and swear we could see a certain star.
Christmas Eve my husband and I, puffered to the max and resembling a pair of bipedal turtles, needed to walk among the lights. We passed our next-door neighbors’ house, admiring the way they’d cloaked a border of fruit trees in single colors: magenta, blue, gold. Fairy lights sparked above a little water folly on the lawn near the street. Like every house in our neighborhood, the only cars in the driveway were their own. We heard a distant shriek of laughter from Liana. We rounded the corner, and walked until empty lots reminded us we were cold.
Heading home, we could see from the corner that our neighbors had already extinguished their lights. Had they retired for the night? It wasn’t that late.
Odd.
So odd.
And then.
We understood that lapsed dimensions are real, that your ambulations might breach both space and time. Luminarias—iconic of Christmas in New Mexico—replaced strings of festive lights. A good hundred of them, fifty to a side, winding a path from gate to front door. They must have had each paper bag filled with sand and ready to go. Lit the votives inside them as we walked.
The house was dark. Silent. We clutched the gate’s tracery, gaping. Nothing glows like luminarias in the invariant gray of a New Mexico winter with its clear-keening cold, centuries-old churches fashioned from clay, the sacred scent of smoke from piñon fires. We forgot we were cold.
“Prepare a pathway in the desert,” proclaimed the prophet’s ancient words. In the depth of dark winter, we found it. We could not leave until we swore we’d seen the footprints of the humble, holy guest.
Maria Hetherton is writing after many years teaching language arts and religious studies. She holds a graduate degree in folklore from Indiana University and is an MFA student at Lindenwood University. She lives in New Mexico with her husband and a pair of feral yet cozy house cats.
