It has been a long time since I’ve been home, feeling the hearth rugs of my childhood and the scratchy sensation they left on my face. I can still see it though, both the upstairs and the downstairs, the family bustling around. Maybe it’s Christmas, or Thanksgiving. We never did anything for Valentines Day, but it could just as easily be one of those unremarkable cold sleet on ice days from December through March up in Michigan, where the snow still gets to your thigh and the schools are open anyway—save when the ice is slick enough you can shove a bus and watch it spin like a hokey puck off the road.
But inside things are not white, not cold, not bitter. Your nose stops dripping with the smell, the smell of hard woods cooking briskly in the fireplace upstairs or the stove downstairs, wafting that good full flavor. A sweeter smell undercuts it though, brownies or cookies usually, popcorn with movies or good radio programs–cinnamon buns. My family and cinnamon buns. They taste like the Holidays themselves, full and fluffy and rich, frosting running around the sides of your mouth as you bite down and feel fiber after fiber part.
And the fire, that glorious fire. The cats slept directly beneath it and though we could never stay that close we understood it. It warms you, but it was more than that. The radiance passed straight through you, cut through you. You became a conduit to the heat and wanted nothing more to exist in that warmth forever. Dad was on the chair, mom on the couch, the kids studying or listening to music on the floor. It was the sun to our world, the source of light and life and heat as the wind howled and tore at the house outside. It felt like family.