White Christmas
The playground hums and chirps, alive with the happy sounds of children at play. We run and pretend, climb and slide with our jacket tails flying out behind us. It is just cold enough to remind me it is winter, but not nearly as cold as my Native New York this time of year. Parents watch from benches and balcony sidelines, overlooking the common ground between student apartments. It is my first winter in New Orleans - a place unlike any other I’ve been to so far, with it’s French street names, termite season, and haunted neighborhoods. Seminary campus is like a technicolor channel on a television that switches to black and white each time we leave its gates. In my youth, I notice it, but I have yet to understand it. Inside the seminary gates, I enjoy what is familiar - families like mine - made up of believers who were fruitful and multiplied - endless playmate options. To be curious is to compare and contrast regularly - I am older, younger, brown-skinned, taller, shorter, Haitian, a little more traveled. None of this matters. Much. In an instant an ordinary day changes. Tiny flurries drift in the air and all around me, people begin to take notice. “It’s snowing!” a child declares. What follows amazes me. “Quick, grab a camera!” someone says. “My child is going to see snow!” says someone else. Children are jumping up and down excitements. Adults descending upon the playground with tears in their eyes and cameras in hand. The snow has yet to cover the ground. This does not matter. Children extend their open hands and stick their tongues out to catch flurries. Their parents take it in with joy that positively beams from their faces. Eyebrows raised, I look to my own parents for support. Later, in the privacy of our home, they help me understand that there a places where people rarely - maybe even never see snow, and evidently, we now live in one of those places. Wild. One more thing for me to understand later.
I remember learning “White Christmas” for choir back in grade school. I sang it with fondness then. I sing it with yearning now. Its been 20 years since New Orleans. I‘ve lived in a few other places since then, and somehow landed indefinitely in Texas. We get the occasional snowfall, but snow on Christmas day is a rare gift. Sweater weather is infrequent, as winter days jump from the 60s to the 80s and 90s. I miss reliable season changes, perfect fall weather, and white Christmases. Who would have know that was something you could take for granted?
earth’s coldest white coat
sparkling below morning sun
warms my memory
