The Luxury of Going Nowhere

One December, just before Christmas, I went to visit my grandparents, who lived down a long dirt road. My parents dropped me off, and as their station wagon pulled away, the sky opened and it began to snow.

It was one of those snowfalls that you stop noticing after childhood, with big fat snowflakes that don’t melt right away. I stood on the porch and held out my mitten, studying each flake as it landed. Within an hour, the gravel at the good end of the dirt road was invisible. By sundown, we were snowed in.

There’s nothing quite like the feeling of being stranded, a feeling people rarely get to experience anymore. Today, even in the country, there are whole industries devoted to the constant availability of motion, dedicated to the eternal openness of the open road.

Here in Southern California, the apocalypse could happen and the traffic reporters still would be ready with a list of passable surface streets. But on that winter afternoon, in that rickety house, even a child could look at those swirling, tumbling flakes and get the message: Make yourself comfortable. Nobody’s going anywhere.

*

I thought of that day the other morning, looking out our living room window at our yard. It was raining so hard that great pools had flooded the roses and the sheer force of the droplets had stripped the poor fig tree of all its leaves.

On the street, shaggy swaths of eucalyptus bark littered the wet asphalt, and every passing car made a sloppy swoosh. A few neighbors had erected front-yard nativity scenes, and the rain ran in rivulets down the Wise Men’s plastic robes.

“El Nino,” theorized the weatherman, loving it that a meteorological phenomenon shared the Christ Child’s nickname. You got the sense that some mischievous little deity was scampering around up there with a lifetime supply of water balloons.

Most likely it was just your basic December in Southern California--rain with a publicist--but it did seem to whisper a cosmic message: Slow down. Be stranded. Let yourself get “rained in.”

In our house, this isn’t an easy message. Though they are precious, our Decembers are decked with donkey work. Stores that once would have considered it indecent to stay open on Sundays now tempt us round-the-clock and on holidays. Work schedules pile on with deadlines and fourth-quarter budget marathons.

Exhausted, we drag ourselves from Christmas pageant to church chorale. Like tuckered-out sugarplum fairies, we stagger from mall to mall. We have to work to remind ourselves that these holidays also have something to do with spirituality. El Nino (the non-meteorological one) becomes a feeling to get around to, a nice afterthought.

Watching the raindrops trickling down the window, we thought: This is us, in constant motion, all wet and none the wiser for it all. Even this “day off” had a schedule: We were supposed to put up Christmas lights, do some shopping. A December birthday needed taking care of, and we were short on milk and the kids were wondering when we’d pick up a Christmas tree.

Maybe it was weariness. Maybe it was a water balloon from heaven. We looked at each other and postponed everything. Oh, what a glorious luxury!

We threw a log on the fire, read the paper, roughhoused, talked. We took turns with the kids playing deejay on the stereo, dancing now to our music, now to theirs. Outside, the wind shredded the fronds from the palm trees and tinkled the wind chimes. Periodically, the 6-year-old would run on tiptoe onto the patio, catching the raindrops and studying each as it landed in her hand.

It wasn’t a blizzard, but it was something: It was ours. It was real. It was the sort of afternoon that memories are made of. El Nino or no, we weren’t going anywhere.

*

This is how I treasure that December day from my childhood, one of the most vivid December days I can recall. I cannot tell you one single present I received that year for Christmas, and yet I can summon every moment of that snowbound experience.

I remember the paper dolls I made from the tablet of faded writing paper in my grandmother’s desk drawer. I remember the little electric Santa on her windowsill. I remember how I fell asleep under the Christmas tree as the Lennon Sisters caroled on Lawrence Welk. I remember the nubby nap of her wall-to-wall carpet and the doilies on her console TV.

And I remember every snowflake that fell, glistening, on my mittened hand as I stood under her porch light, just after sunset that night. No two were alike, and each seemed a gift, an exquisite message, irreplaceable, as miraculous as a star in the East, as a day in a life.

Shawn Hubler’s email address is shawn.hubler@latimes.com.