My dad sits in the hotel room in Arkadelphia, AK, playing with a toy that I had bought as a gift for my girlfriend's sister. He arrived the night before and in a fit of excitement to get home we left right from the airport at 10pm and almost made it to Little Rock before we got too tired. He was like an angel swooping down to rescue me from the loneliness that plagued my time in Dallas, and from that point on I felt like I was home; its the strange feeling that a loved one can bring- no matter where you are, if you're together, it feels like home.
Sarah showed up a few days after I made it back to Maryland; we explored the rafters of my grandfather's old barn where my dad keeps the planks of cherry that his father had given him. With two feet of snow in the forecast, Sarah and I were not able to drive back to Erie, PA to see her family. Snow like that comes to Maryland very rarely; I did not want to miss it. We played in the snow like children. Tucker, my old red dog, now blind from the insulin shots that he gets everyday for his diabetes, seems to be fading away more and more as time goes by and I wonder how much longer we'll have him around, but on that day he still had the spirit and love to find Sarah in his void and give her a kiss. My brother yawns on the way home after a long Christmas day and my parents hold each other in our foyer for a while. I remember the inescapable feeling that as we all get older these Christmas memories become numbered and it made me afraid to move, afraid to walk away from it all for even a moment for fear that I would miss something.
