“It’s fruitcake weather Buddy!”
Our house is unusually quiet today while Babe recovers from serious but successful surgery that saved his life. He sleeps a lot. After a certain age recovery is no walk in the park. Emotionally, I am overwhelmed with relief each morning when I wake up to find him still snoring next to me. I am overjoyed that the two of us have been granted additional time together.
The antique clock we bought at a flea market in Pennsylvania is ticking away the minutes, a stoic sentinel on the mantle over the fireplace. It is flanked on both sides by the traditional manger scene that I gently boxed up last January and with even more care unboxed early this morning. Hoping to festive things up around here, I went outside and pruned the magnolia tree down to a nub to make Christmas wreaths for the front door, side door and back door. Okay, so I got a little carried away. After hanging the wreaths, I rested before I attempted to decorate a six-foot tree with ornaments collected for the past twenty something years.
Although the house is too quiet, the old mantle clock seems to be ticking louder than it usually does. An annoyed part of me wants to get up, grab the pendulum and stop it in mid-tick but I don’t because the ticking sound is constant. When I analyze the prevailing stillness I realize that this house of ours has every reason to be hushed. It is what houses do when there is a sick person about.
The tree is up. It looks awful. I nearly lost my religion stringing lights on the darn thing, so now I am folded into Babe’s recliner trying to recuperate. The top of the already lopsided tree did not get the proportioned amount of lights because my five-foot-four body was too lazy to look for a step stool high enough for me to be able to get up there. The angel looks more deranged than heavenly. If she topples over, she’ll just have to deal with it. Light stringing is normally Babe’s job. This year? Not so much.
The reason I have written a lot of Christmas stories is due to the fact that I was inspired to capture my seasonal thoughts on paper after reading Truman Capote’s 1963 short story, A Christmas Memory. That haunting tale about baking fruitcakes with his cousin Sook is why today I continue writing my own holiday memories about growing up in a small Southern town.
Looking out my window at the leafless, birdless winter morning, two words thread through my mind unbidden: Fruitcake weather. Could it be the ghost of Capote trying to tell me something? Babe is napping, and when I go in to check on him, I feel an overpowering desire to do something to make him smile. The leafless, birdless trees gently sway in the cold winter breeze as if singing a familiar phrase directly to me: “Oh my! It’s fruitcake weather.”
It hits me that the song of the trees is telling me to go to the store and buy candied cherries and pineapple, pecans and walnuts. The whispered directive instructs me to chop, mix and bake until the fragrance of freshly baked fruitcake is wafting out of every crack, cranny and mouse hole in this unusually quiet house. According to the leafless, birdless trees, baking a fruitcake will help me drown out the sound of time ticking away.
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