Route 6

For most of my childhood Thanksgiving was a singular memory: a road trip from my home in Northeastern Ohio to my grandmother’s home in the Allegheny mountains of Eastern Pennsylvania.  The drive took us 8 long hours as we followed a two lane state highway that meandered in and around the mountains of the region, and the tiny towns that dotted the hillsides and valleys of Northeastern Pennsylvania. 

I curled up with my comic books and pillows in the back seat and my father drove over mostly dry roads up steep mountains, around hairpin turns, and through small towns. We did hit a snow storm now and then, and I watched as my parents silently worried as they hit icy mountain roads and went across bridges in the rain and sleet and snow of the nascent winter driving season. 

I came to know and love the towns along that road: Coudersport, Wellsboro, Towanda, Wyalusing, Wysox.  Each had its own quaint charm: a river, a town square, a plaque honoring a civil war hero, store front diners and craft stores, an entire store dedicated to selling Christmas decorations.  Each town, always decked out for the coming holidays with wreathes and garland, seemed like they had a special welcome for us as we had to slow the car to accommodate the sudden drop to a 35 mile an hour speed limit.

We rarely stopped except to get gas.  Delicious food, including my grandmother’s special recipe sugar cookies, were waiting at the end of the line, no need for anything until we got there. Of course we were all impatient too.  I am sure I said, “how much longer till we get there?” the requisite 100 times, after every stop light and lane change.

Somewhere in my young adulthood when trips to Grandmother’s house changed to trips to my Aunt’s (Grandma died in 1984), my parents began taking the new interstate that opened up just north of Route 6.  It shaved two hours off their driving time.  It was then I realized that the long slow meandering drive through the small towns of Pennsylvania was probably the best part about our annual Thanksgiving pilgrimage.  Oh, I loved seeing my family and eating all that great food, that was always important, but the getting there by that slow beautiful drive became a touchstone for me.

Thanksgiving reminds me of those times in my parent’s car, watching the towns go by, wondering what it was like to live in Laceyville, Pennsylvania next to the Susquehanna river.  I can still hear the sound of the car as it slowed to turn the corner. 

Of course, all the drives we take now are fast and efficient. There is no other way to get where we go, and of course I miss the slow road: the anticipation of what waited at the end, the intimacy of small towns even for strangers passing through, and the sites and sounds of other places and times.    I have promised myself that the next time I take route 6, I am definitely stopping to shop at the Christmas store and reading that Civil War marker, and maybe even stopping for pie at some town diner. I really hope it is all still there waiting for me.

Amy for the Poplar Grove Muse

The Spirit of Birds

When I entered the small living room of my host on the Solstice day, my eyes were drawn immediately to the Christmas tree, flocked in white and covered in birds: clear glass birds, traditional ornament birds, felted birds, birds made of bells and pinecones.  The tree was magical, and it drew me once again to a story I have been trying to write for months, well years really: a story of birds on a Christmas tree.

My auntie, long deceased, gave bird ornaments.  She believed that birds should hang on Christmas trees. Every year she bought a new bird to hang on the tree in her home, and gave it to her son, her only child, to fill him with the magic of birds.

After Auntie died I picked my cousin up at the airport to spend the holiday with our family, his first Christmas without his mother.  He told me sadly that he would miss getting a bird from his mother.  At her death, I hadn’t thought of this detail, as I am sure he hadn’t until this season came around.  I asked him what he did with all the birds from past Christmases.  “Gone,” he said.  “She sold them in a garage sale when I was in college.”

I remember the sale.  Auntie was tired of moving, tired of schlepping her things from apartment to apartment, tired of fighting with her only son, and tired of the pain that comes with divorce. She sold it all: childhood toys, jewelry, family antiques, clothing, and Christmas decorations.

For many years now, I have been reliving that garage sale.  Wishing I had the presence of mind to stop it or to at least stop the sale of those birds.  I wished I could have bought them and presented them to my cousin in some grand gesture of family love and loyalty.  I even pictured myself going door to door on the street where Auntie lived asking people if they had bought any bird ornaments at a garage sale, oh so many years ago.  Every year at about this time I can picture the event: bird ornaments being lifted out of a dusty card board box as they were sold one by one on a hot July day while my cousin waited tables in a far away town, trying to save enough money to buy books for college, unaware that they were disappearing.

The story has a happy ending, I told my host, whose tree I stood there and admired.  A few years later my cousin married a woman who gives him a bird ornament every year for Christmas. He has 10 now. 

Legend says that birds are the carriers of spirit: taking the soul with them as they fly high above treetops or perch on branches to sing their song, and so I bask in the glow of my hosts bird filled Christmas tree in the waning light of this solstice day.  All those years I had pictured the fateful garage sale when really this special bird filled tree is what I should have been dreaming about. I finally understand what Auntie always knew. At last, I am comforted by birds. 

Amy C for the PGM