Fall at school smells really good. The playground has dry, crunchy, swirly leaves all around the edges and wet, mushy ones are stuck to the seats of the swings. The grass on the soccer field still gets cut every week and the chilly breezes of October carry the smell of fresh cut grass up and down the hallways when a door is propped open by a custodian or an unruly kid.

We can’t decide if we need coats or not. Actually, we know we don’t need coats but our teachers aren’t sure they should let us go to recess without them. We don’t notice the slimy snotty crusty noses wiped on our long sleeves or the deep, hacky coughs that we bring back in from the chilly fall weather after lunch recess.

The hallways are lined with class projects. Mrs. Burke’s Kindergartners have decorated leaf cutouts with crayons that are lined along the hall next to their classroom. Mrs. Gredy’s 3rd graders have bug collections while the 4th graders build birdhouses and miniature log cabins that line the opposite hallway – The Big Kid Hallway.

The bus drivers give us little treat bags full of Tootsie Pops and Pop Rocks tied with orange ribbons. The lunch ladies find ways to fancy up apple slices with caramel and cider. Mr. Simon teaches us Christmas songs already because we’re practicing for our big Christmas concert at the end of the semester. Sometimes on nice days, we’ll sit outside under the trees while he plays guitar and teaches us a brand new song.

Our hot, foggy breath on the bus windows is smeared with initials and hearts and tiny footprints made from the side of your curled fist pressed into them. The floor of the bus is hot and we can feel the heart burning against the backs of our feet under the seats. Everyone’s nose runs and everyone coughs in the hot, closed air of the school bus. It is not wonder we’re all catching the same colds.

We take fieldtrips to farms and pastures and historic places, tying our sweatshirts around our wastes at lunch while the hood of it drags the floor behind us. By the time we get on the bus to head back to school, we’re all wearing our sweatshirts again as the sun already begins to dip in the sky.

When we get home from school, we carve pumpkins with our parents and start asking for hot chocolate and watching “13 Nights of Halloween” on ABC Family. We go shopping for our Halloween costumes weeks in advance but forget to get Trick-r-Treat buckets until the day of. We have Fall Break Sleepovers and you can start to see smoke rising from more and more chimneys on the way to school in the mornings. We forget all about Thanksgiving between the excitement of Halloween candy and the Christmas Kleenex commercials that have been playing for weeks.

The hot blowing air of furnaces that have been still and silent all summer tells us that Winter is almost here, with its own set of treats and activities. But I really like Fall at school. It just smells really good.

Dad’s Day

We’re playing basketball. We’re always playing basketball. When it’s hot out, when it’s cold out, when I still have 10 chapters to go in the book I’m reading, we’re playing basketball.

I whine and cry and give up trying, but it’s no good. He insists. We play more basketball.

He shells peanuts and munches them on the couch, watching basketball on TV. Sometimes he paints or draws or sings, but most often he’s somehow involved in a basketball game.

He doesn’t usually have a job. He sleeps a lot. He makes homemade donuts. He finds me a kitten for Christmas. He rakes the biggest leaf piles, and we jump in them.

He and Mom argue and yell. A lot. In kindergarten, I tell my teacher, “My dad moves in and he moves out. He moves in. He moves out.” It doesn’t occur to me that that might not be normal.

He cleans the house from top to bottom sometimes. We go to school and it’s a mess, but when we get home it’s spotless.

He writes love letters to Mom, or sometimes apology letters. My brother and I find them when we’re snooping in drawers in desks we’re not supposed to get into. He has the prettiest handwriting.

He thinks I am going to be the best basketball player the world has ever seen.

He yells sometimes, using the really big bad cuss words.

My sophomore year in high school, he is diagnosed with Schizophrenia. He moves out of the house….again. He goes to the hospital and takes medicine and then moves in with his sister.

I lose him for a long time. I vow that he will never be invited to my wedding or welcomed at Christmas time. I promise myself lots of things when I’m hurt.

As an adult, I learn a new perspective. I begin to accept him as he was and as he is. He remains very much a gentleman to me as a grown person, and bows gracefully out unless asked to attend. His presence becomes an awkward, almost-welcome shadow in the outskirts of my life.

This year, I feel the urge to call and wish him a Happy Father’s Day for what I believe is the first time ever.

I have to ask my sister for his number. I haven’t spoken with him since maybe before Christmas or maybe even Thanksgiving. I haven’t seen him in even longer.

I call. He answers. I can hear the pleasure in his voice when he realizes it’s me. We chat. Nothing heavy or personal, just the sort of stuff you might share with someone sitting next to you on a train.

For my own reasons, I keep it short. I say Goodbye and that I don’t mean to keep him. He stops me just as I’m about to hang up and says,

”You know I love you, right?”

Christmas Eve is at Nana and Papaw’s house. I hear sleigh bells outside, and when we open the front door, a McDonald’s Play Set is out there waiting for me on the porch! I make Gary crawl all on his knees past the drive-thru window and order from a menu of plastic pancakes and rubber fries.

Before it gets too late, we have to go home so we can get to sleep before Santa comes. Mom always says we have to wait until Christmas morning to open our presents, but we are insistent and persuasive little boogers.

“Okay,” she finally says. “You can open your stockings. But that is all.” But we already know we’ve won. An hour and a half later, we sit in a pile of tape and shredded paper and toys we can’t take out of the box yet because we’ll lose the pieces in the mess.

We set out cookies and milk on the kitchen counter. We set out celery and carrots for the reindeer. We feel bad that everyone else forgets about the reindeer. They’re the ones doing all the work, you know – all that flying.

In the morning, Mom wakes us up. She can’t wait for us to get up on our own. She wants us to see what Santa brought. In the dining room, in front of the fireplace, little globs of melted snow on the floor show us the route Santa took from the Christmas tree to the kitchen for cookies and then back up the chimney.  The celery and carrots are nibbled too.

All of our presents from Nana and Mom and Sissy are wrapped and under the tree for ages before Christmas. In the weeks leading up to it, my brothers and I divide up our stacks and shake the boxes and count who has more and therefore must be more loved.

But Christmas morning – Santa Presents – this is different. These presents aren’t wrapped. Four shiny new toys sit in front of the Christmas tree. Our names are displayed in curly, North Pole-esque letters. Our stockings are also magically full again. Candy. Squirt guns. Lip gloss. Teeny figurines. We gorge on sweets and Tic-tac’s. We watch Christmas Vacation before lunch and after lunch and before bed, quoting every single line.

The stores are all closed. So are the restaurants. No one is on the computer or a cell phone or even earphones. We sit cozily ensconced in our little house, losing pieces of our new toys in the discarded wrapping paper, bundling up for brief sledding and snowman building and creek ice skating adventures. We come back inside; our snow-covered things end up sopping wet in the floor by the door.

Hot chocolate.  Eggnog. Homemade peanut brittle and a cheese tray that someone left for Papaw on the mail route. We finally feel brave enough to sneak the candy canes from the tree that have been hanging there as decoration. I like the sweet ones with rainbow colors that taste like skittles or bubble gum.

Our Christmas – the jolliest of holidays.

Singing in the car is our form of family bonding. No song is safe. Disney tunes, Christmas carols, little ditties from childhood, “Arms of the Angel” by Sara McLaughlin. We sing at the top of our lungs. Mom in the front seat driving and the rest of us crammed in the backseat with random articles of clothes, discarded fast food containers, jars of coins, ribbon. Mom just can’t seem to keep that car cleaned out. We pile in on top of it all, seatbelts optional, and sing.

On a road trip to Utah, we take a minivan. It’s a long drive. 16 hours. We sometimes pull over to nap in a rest stop or to watch the sunrise. My basketball team made it to nationals and we’re making the long haul there and back on the interstates. We stop at a little museum somewhere out west, and climb aboard covered wagons and watch a fountain of a man pouring water out of his boot. Costumes, sets, and other props take up an entire room in the back. We put on a play. Mom records it. I am a damsel in distress. My brother is an Indian chief who captured me. My other brother is the sheriff on his way to rescue me. We laugh so hard that we cannot breathe, cannot stand up straight, cannot think straight. And in the car, we sing “Celebration” by Kool and the Gang when we finally reach another state line.

Mom stops on the side of the highway to video a cow in a pasture. We have cows in the pasture at home too, but this is a Nebraska cow (or a Utah cow or something “western”). Our cramped legs can use the stretch anyway, so we gripe and whine and complain but we get out of the car and watch the cows. Suddenly, a snake! Mom is terrified of snakes. It is positioned between us and the van. Did we walk over it and not even realize it? It starts to slither. We jump and shriek as one, as a family. Perhaps more terrifying than attacking us, it makes its way toward the van. The side door is hanging wide open. Kids never think to close the door so the battery won’t run down or so the snake won’t be able to get inside.

We don’t have any idea where the snake went after he disappeared beneath the van. Someone surmises that he slithered up our tailpipe and would most likely poison, strangle, and eat us all in our sleep. We sing louder now, because we are afraid. The songs carry a hint of desperation. After a while, we forget to be afraid. Winter comes, and we drive through the streets at home, attempting to belt out “Chestnuts roasting on an open fire…” but no one can remember all the words, so some parts come out as simply noise or hums. We sing on the way to school Christmas concerts, on the way from winter dances, on our way to town to get groceries. Our breath fogs up the glass and we draw little figures or write things backwards so you can read it from the outside or make foot prints with our hands, the way a girl showed me how to do on the school bus once.

We sing in the car.