Day Six: The Sleigh

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I did not go to university. My mother died about that time, and I had to run the family business. That sounds so grand, but in truth, I am the only member of my family left. Christmas when I was eighteen was particularly difficult. My school friends had all been away in the world for three months; were drinking deep of the experiences that university gave them. I knew they would return to their homes with stories to tell of drunken exploits, fumbled experimentations, sorrows, tragedies, joys and pain. I could hear the air vibrate with the sheer weight of words waiting to be outpoured.

I ran.

I ran into the woods, deep, dark. I left the house I had lived in all my life and I wandered each day, leaving at dawn so that my friends would not find me in and returning long after they had hidden themselves in the warmth of the pub, secure in their adulthood. The snow was thick on the ground that year - the first time in many years that I had seen it so deep. Each night it fell again, so that each dawn brought the trackless waste back to me.

There are other people in the woods - I see their tracks sometime. There are those who fetch holly and mistletoe for the woods, those who hunt rabbits and seek the foxes that have broken into the chicken coops that most houses in this village still have out back. And there are sleigh tracks too; the depth of the track describing the contents of the sleigh. Here, a christmas tree laden and pulled, there two children going down a slope together. Different marks, different stories, all wiped clean with the next fall of snow.

Mother and I went out sledding. The tracks we made are still there.