Thinking About Normal

As Christmas arrives once more,
I look out my window thinking about normal –
about what it is and what it has been,
compared to other years.
I have strung lights on my tree,
unwrapped favorite ornaments,
remembered the fragile glass balls
I once helped grandmother place
carefully on each fragrant branch.

Did those gleaming baubles break, 
or were they given or thrown away
after she died? 
Would they still be beautiful now, 
intact and bright as I recall them?
Glitter, stripes, and spheres
hung with strands of ribbon, sparkling stars
that twinkled in lamplight, bright as the ones
I could see outside in the night sky.

The Christmas Eve when I was four,
my mother and I heard pounding 
on the wooden door.  
It was Santa Claus
with his white beard, a stocking cap,
and long woolen coat.
At first, I didn’t know
that deep voice, 
asking me if I’d been
a good girl.
He picked me up
and I trembled in his arms, 
knew I had not been good,
smelled woodsmoke on his collar,
and my father’s shaving lotion.

All that clatter and scraping
like hooves against shingles,
but when I ran to the window
I only saw swirling snow,
pushed up the sticky pane
and let in gusts of frozen air,
heard a faint jingle of bells
from far away.  
It was white, the yard, snow 
drifting down.
White and normal, like nothing
magic had ever happened at all,
broken only by the yip of coyotes 
somewhere beyond the hill.

Then I saw my father stooped over, 
carrying two pails of water 
from the outside pump 
where he said he had been
thawing and priming, 
so it wouldn’t 
freeze in the night. 

Rosalie Sanara Petrouske is a professor of writing at Lansing Community College in Lansing.

She has written three chapbooks of poetry, including the most recent, “What We Keep” (2016). In 2021 she was a finalist for the distinction of U.P. poet laureate. 

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