My Brother’s House

Sometimes I believe that if I concentrate hard, stare into the middle distance and let my mind go cross-eyed, I can experience what I know to be true: that all times are one time, all events are happening simultaneously in an immense eternal instant, and the passage of time — the way we rush in the direction of increased entropy — is just an illusion.

So when I stand in the hallway outside the master bedroom in my brother’s house, it’s not a little crazy that I hear my sister-in-law and me laughing that it’s Christmas Eve and we’re still up, at 2:00 a.m., hiding in the bedroom and wrapping presents for our families. It’s not silly of me to think that if I turned and walked back to the kitchen I’d find my sister, brother, and husband sitting around the butcher block island drinking wine and hot chocolate, my brother-in-law telling a funny story, and all of us looking young and slim, not middle aged and a little tired.

My sanity is intact if I imagine that my little daughters are asleep upstairs, and their slightly older cousins are watching movies on the big screen TV, not getting married and having their own babies. Tomorrow we’ll eat sour cream apple coffee cake and open presents, my brother will receive a CD recording of “Hair,” and my daughters will dance a weird, neo-hippy-ish dance when he plays it on the stereo. They’ll be little, sweet, and charming, not grown and flying off to Switzerland and forgetting to email me for weeks on end.

It’s June. We’re at my brother’s house for our nephew’s wedding. The youngest of our kids is eighteen now. But I can’t take a step in my brother’s house without breathing in some sweet Christmas memory.