The Snowflake by Daisee

 

Smoke always smells different in the wintertime.  I'm not talking about that flavored tobacco that people put into their hookah pots, peppermint or spice for the holidays; this is something completely different.  This is the smell of the just lit match as it dwindles in the air wanting to burn out just before it makes it to your cigarette.  The cold is still; burns so much more intensely than the amber flame it almost suffocates it.  When the smell of my sulfur matches change, I know Christmas is approaching. 

Just as the scents change as the temperature in the air cools or warms, so do the memories from the years.  One of my favorites of winters past is the holiday that my eldest made a snowflake of sorts for the top of our Christmas tree. 

Ezra had just turned three and was just beginning to grasp the concept of the holiday.  He knew that Santa brought the presents, though there was no way in hell we were going to get him on the jolly old elf’s lap.  He knew that with cold occasionally came snow, and with snow meant the entire city would close down.  It just so happened that on a random, early December morning, it snowed. 

There was nowhere to go, no one to see.  For reasons I don’t recall his baby sister and mother were not in the house, or maybe I just don’t remember them being there, because this was our time together.  Regardless, we huddled around our hot cocoa, and I pulled out the construction paper and some paint, and for the first time in his young life, I saw him form a memory. 

We cut little shapes out of blue paper; rounded corners, sharp edges.  He was perched in my lap, his little toes drumming rhythms on the wooden bar of the table that his feet could reach.  My hands holding the scissors, his hands holding mine, guiding.  “No, Daddy!  Go this way!”  He was the artist, and I was one of his tools. 

After the snowflake, or more precisely something resembling a piece of paper that had been put through a meat grinder, had been cut and unfolded, we dipped our fingers into white paint.  His little fingers, so nimble yet so tiny, made swooping motions over the cut bits and pieces, leaving traces of his fingerprints.  “Here, Daddy.  Let me see your thumb.”  And he placed my thumbprint right next to his in the center, where the paper was still intact.   

We sprinkled colored glitter over the wet paint, and set the snowflake on the kitchen counter to dry.  I made him his favorite lunch; a hotdog wrapped in a piece of cheese with canned peas mashed up like potatoes.  By this time the snow had stopped falling outside and had begun to melt, which is how the snow usually is in Tulsa, and the early afternoon sky had already begun to darken with evening.  Ezra requested reruns of a cartoon on a network I can never remember the name of, and we checked the snowflake.   

Making sure not to spill excess glitter on the kitchen floor, he carried the paper, by himself with me tow, to the garage to shake off the excess pieces of sparkle.  His rosy cheeks were covered in the remnants, and his beautiful red hair had green flakes of the plastic pieces sitting on the edges.  I smiled at him and kissed the top of his head on the spot where his hair parted naturally, and lead him back into the warm house. 

That night my wife sat in the overstuffed chair in the living room, and my son and daughter were fast asleep in their beds, I placed that handmade snowflake on top of our Christmas tree in place of the star we usually kept there.  Natalie watched me do it, yet she never questioned it, never asked, and never said a word. 

After New Years, all of our Christmas decorations were tucked away until the first week of December the following year, and every year after that I placed that snowflake on the top of our tree.  Ezra’s and my thumbprints in the center.  The kids grew up, moved out, had children of their own, and Ezra’s baby fingerprints were still at the top of our Christmas tree.   

When Natalie died, I stopped putting up the Christmas decorations.  I put the Christmas tree and the stockings into the attic storage; they sat alongside all of the old baby clothes and toys.  I spent most of my days in that over stuffed chair in the living room, watching television; in the spare bedroom, playing piano and attempting to write music that no one will ever hear; in our bed, missing my wife’s warmth and conversation.   

Ezra’s snowflake sits on the mantle. 

There are two constants in my life.  The smell of smoke when Christmas is near; that burning in your nostrils when you light the match to light the cigarette.  The other is Ezra.  His and my fingers together on the shredded blue construction paper, sitting on the top of the fireplace.