Free The Christmas Letters by Lee Smith Page B

coats and jackets in the hall closet where they’d been accumulating for years . . . all I could see was what had been. I walked through the whole house slowly, then returned to the gleaming foyer to stand for a moment just before I left for the last time, and that’s when it really hit me.
    This is the end, I thought. This really is the end of us as a family, the end of my world as I have known it, the end of me as the person I have been since I first met Sandy. That’s when I started to cry. I cried and cried—loud, choking sobs, like a person who has lost everything, which I had. (But in another way I hadn’t, of course, though it would take even more time for me to know this.) I suppose it was only fitting that I should face the end of our marriage there, in the last of our houses, and I thought of them all—the trailer at Greenacres Park; that wonderful old place on Rosemary Street, with the tin roof; Hummingbird Heights, with the great yard and the fantastic jungle gym, always full of tumbling kids, all of them grown and gone now; and then finally this “castle,” as Melanie used to call it, Stonebridge Club Estates, the last one, the last shell ever to hold that family which we once were.
    Well, I cried and cried.
    But after about thirty minutes of this, a funny thing started happening. Imperceptibly, even in the midst of all the crying, I felt my spirits start to lift. This continued. I could actually feel energy coming into me, some essential energy that seemed oddly familiar, like an old friend you don’t quite recognize at first. Now, I believe—without dramatizing too much, I hope!—that this was the moment when my self came back, or when I came back to my own real self again.
    I found some Kleenex in my purse, blew my nose, dropped my key on the floor in the middle of the hall, and opened the door. The lock clicked shut behind me, and thatwas that. Sunlight was everywhere, so harsh against my eyes, but I didn’t care. I got back into my car and drove around the circle and down the long driveway, and did not look back. I have not looked back since.
    Until today, I suppose, when I decided to write a Christmas letter again. Why not? I’ve got a lot to say. And the Christmas letter was always my thing, not Sandy’s, though for so many years of course I signed both names, and thought of us as one.

    Thursday, Dec. 12, 1993
    Two days have passed since I began this letter. Two extraordinary days in which I drove over to Village Self Storage and got out the copies I kept of all my Christmas letters from former years. It was so dark in the storage unit that I could scarcely see, and despaired of ever finding anything, but luckily they were right there at the entrance in Mama’s old hope chest from West Virginia, next to a box of Andrew’s drawings and another box labeled “Trophy Collection”— God knows what all is in that storage unit! Now I begin to wonder if this is healthy or unhealthy, under the circumstances, to save so much. Oh who knows?! I have had it with shrinks and marriage counselors, of which more later.
    At any rate, I found the letters easily. I brought the chest back here (along with two boxes marked CHRISTMAS ORN ., I figure I might as well make a little effort this year, though I certainly don’t have “the Christmas spirit”), made a big pot of tea for myself, and started back at the beginning, reading. 1967 through 1991. Twenty-four Christmas letters, 24 years of family life stuffed into these envelopes and stuck away just as easily as Sandy has stuck me back into “the past” already, that dark box into which he has consigned so much: his childhood, his family. . . . Well, I just can’t do it! I’ll have to haul everything out eventually, I’ll have to go through it all again, “healthy” or not—
    Several things have struck me, reading back through all the years.
    We really were “in love,” Sandy and me. We really were a family. It was all true. No matter what Sandy