Car lights in the rain

From the top of my hill in the goat pen I can hear the cars and see the headlights through the trees on highway 92. It's only a two lane road but it's a major thoroughfare between Douglasville and Fairburn and on to Fayetteville, and it's always busy. On a night like tonight, in misty rain and cold, I remember traveling in the back seat of my father's Ford station wagon on roads like this to his parents' farm in east Tennessee. My eyes always glued to window watching the lights of houses shining through the trees, I speculated about what went on behind those windows. Was there a family? Were there children? What were they like?

In my childhood Christmas time was like this, cold and rainy, and travel happened at night. If I was lucky there would be reindeer lights on a rooftop or Santa outlined in lights on a lawn, sometimes a bright tree through a window. It was a ride of great anticipation. My brother and sister might be sleeping on the seat beside me, but I couldn't sleep.

No matter what time we got there, my grandparents would be awake and ready with hugs to greet us. There would be strings of lights around the living room windows and steaming hot chocolate on the stove. The next day we would walk out to the fields and find the perfect tree to cut and bring back to the house for decorating, maybe my grandfather would shoot mistletoe out of a tree with his shotgun. Presents would magically appear under the tree over the next few days. I spent days running through fields of cows and crossing barbed wire fences onto neighboring farms, knowing that if they saw me they'd know who I was and to whom I belonged, or climbing the split log walls of the old barn and playing in tall stacks of hay bales. In the evening I loved sitting on the basement steps to watch my grandfather shovel coal into the big pot bellied heater burning warmth through the house while my grandmother worked her magic at the stove with meat and vegetables that often originated on that farm.

Funny how car lights on a rainy road can sometimes bring back the best memories of your life.