Oh to be here.

February and ice but no snow. Funny. A fortnight but somehow feeling like days without end till spring. Two weeks for each grandchild now but entire months then. Mother bringing everyone down on the train with a tutor for each one while Father stayed in the big house on Long Island with the Rolls Royce and chauffeur to get to the stock exchange.

Down by Thanksgiving and not back till Easter. Christmas with biscuits and corn chowder and church in the little chapel down the way.

No one learning much and wanting to go ice skating at the rink in Central Park but the grownups hating to be cold. Ancestors who grew up somewhere really warm, they must have had.

But old rice fields to run across and ditches to jump. The river to try to paddle to the sea in the old canoe. Falling in buildings to play in.

School friends missed but the teachers with their homework not so much. Mad they would be later. The rest of the class knowing twice as much by then, but not mattering how. At least two months before going back.

Two canes to get around and no more running down the drive but still the same air to breathe and the same Christmas Eve supper with the little tree. Bedroom on the first floor, not the third, but the same porch and easier to walk out to without all those stairs and yelling nurses.

Up to the nursery for a look around and sitting down hard at the old painting table with its mottled stains. Drawer pulled open and little sister’s pictures upside down. But something harder at the bottom in a frame. A treat and a memory in flood. The elephant to ride after the rocking horse stopped rocking and his mane fell out.

From Mother’s brother, the one who fought for the Boers and never came back. . . that sad but the elephant not . . . no . . . a fine memory and an entire day to sit and enjoy it . . .

Oh to be there.

A new job for a new year. An old vaudeville theatre, it is. Well not much longer. Being reborn as a community center with a place for the ladies to sit and knit. Funny. Something they had done forever but bigger now and more room required.

All those years in graduate school in Paris and nothing but splinters and sneezes. An office yes but everything needing to be looked through. Three cousins wanting everything old and pretty and their mother rich and not someone to offend. No, better to look through it all and see.

Someone offering to help and one of the cousins up to look through things.

A good thing. Like a time capsule, it almost was. Manager with a hook to yank people who couldn’t sing off into the wings, movie screen for a curtain and a projection booth for movies in reels and then nothing. Bad part of town having grown around it and no one wanting to go anymore. Car parts for the shops for miles around instead.

Dust in sheets over everything and corner cobwebs that reached to the curtain rods and then to the light in the middle of the ceiling like children’s birthday party streamers. Windows you can barely see out of. Stage makeup so thick you’d have to break in down into little rocks of rouge with a sledgehammer.

But an old trunk way in the back of where the chorus girls used to change. Pictures in the bottom with no names. Forgotten when the show moved on to the next town. Used as a footrest by tiny chorines ever since and never opened again judging by how hard the lock had to be hammered to get it open.

But worth it. Two ladies dancing somewhere in the golden time. Canada to explore and lots of men from before they all died in the trenches in France.

But not knowing any of that yet . .  .no . . . another Christmas celebrated and a new year to begin  . . . always a good thing . . .something to look forward to and not the other way . . .