The vineyard near our house is the first indicator of winter. The vines are stripling, leafless transmissions, clinging to the supportive wires and rows, whatever fruit they had leftover now shriveled to black bronchioles. I am always afraid for this vineyard. I've seen too many other orchards and fields in the valley overturned, plowed up for new neighborhoods and housing complexes. I am afraid that the business of grapes isn't one that will outlast the business of construction and fences and crowded manufactured homes. Each summer, it seems, the laborers in the vineyard grow fewer and there is more and more fruit left to rot on the vines, hanging heavy and swelling purple. I take pictures in the vineyard often, I've written poetry about the vineyards, I have grown up with the vineyards. There is an irrigation ditch that runs above the vineyard that we walk next to as a family on Sunday afternoons. Now, during the winter, the ditch is dry and fractured with skins of mud, the tall pondgrass that lisped so delicately in the summer and drowsed in the fall is matted now and gray. Ducks escape with our coming down the path and little finches scuttle about the trees, nervous as misplayed notes. Under the dirt, I can almost feel the dull warmth of the borroughs and dens of the fieldmice that we never see – the plumbing and infrastructure of their tunnels, their pink, wriggling, sightless newborns nesting in paper and grass, their slumber. Everything slumbers.
The fog sinks into the valley in late November, and by December it is permanent, clearing only for a few short midafternoon hours, before creeping in again like trenchgas by evening. As I grow older, the fog becomes more suffocating. It shrinks the world. It condenses things so that you are alone, regardless of company. In the fields, along the roads to Jacksonville, the trees are wintering and solitary, and the horses are accidental in the fog and the grass. The fog is a collapsed lung. In French class, I look outside and shapes and lights move in the bladders of fog. Verbs conjugate, I lose track of time, the fog clears by lunchtime and it is very cold.
The Saturday after thanksgiving we bring the Christmas decorations down from the shed and just before evening, we drive to a Christmas tree farm to pick a tree. On the way, we play traditional Christmas music, which is one of my favorite kinds of music. It is warm and dark and it speaks of winter nights when everything has been adorned with frost, like shy brides, yet unseen by their soon-to-be husbands. Traditional harp music, Greensleeves, great choirs of men singing Ave Maria. It is Christmas music that I look forward to most when the season comes. It steps nicely into the fog. The evenings are made less solitary with Christmas music; well-known songs that chamber memories and ghosts and the smell of cinnamon candles and drowsiness.
We go to the same tree farm each year. The people who own the farm are about the age of my parents and they own a big, drooping yellow Labrador and he and my dad talk about back pain and the mechanisms of owning a Christmas tree business, and we are all good friends, even if we only see each other once a year, for less than a half hour. The farm sprawls, the light of the day fringes the needled trees, and the trees are conclaved. It is tradition to pick a tree with pine cones and an abandoned bird's nest. The trees near the front of the farm are small and dwarfed and the trees in the back are tall and dark. Near the back of the farm, with the tall trees, there's a pasture with horses and in the dusk, in the fog, they are native and intruded upon when I look at them. After reading westerns and living for so many years near farmlands and pastures, I have a special place in my heart for horses. I have ridden them rarely and only in my childhood; however, I recognize them as creatures of poetry and nobility – with their broad faces and filamented veins and the sweat that girdles under the saddle and the way that they communicate to each other in the night, nickering and touching, like windowsill ants. Dead grass hushes under the wood fence dividing me from the horses, fluted and stopped, like pennywhistles, and I put out my hand for the closest horse, and he nudges it and I can feel his stiff whiskers and the sloppy kiss of his lips. I hear my family debating trees. For a long, uninterrupted moment, the horse and I learn everything there is to know about each other. I close my eyes and I smell him and we are in the malpais of the lowcountry, where each horizon holds a different weather pattern and to the east rainclouds are inky and clustered like squid, leaking beaten rugs of rain.
We tow the tree home and by the time we get home it is dark and very cold. There is a brainstorm of ice along the rims of all the windows and we play more Christmas music and we lug big dusty tupperware boxes containing our ornaments into our living room. The ornaments have a particular smell – a musty, revealed smell. In their boxes and wrappings, they seem to sigh and release held breath when we open them up, like porcelain djinn. Some of the ornaments are very old, and all of them have some kind of memory or sentimental value attached. We have three nativity scenes. In all of them Mary is quiet-faced and solemn and at least one of the figures is cracked, like a seashell that was too beautiful to pass up, even in its destruction. The lights we string on the tree are multi-colored and tacky, but we love them and when you squint your eyes they become splintered stars, events, and celestial earbobs, spun into a spindled, needled galaxy. I can't even imagine a tree without multi-colored lights. It would seem so impersonal with all-white bulbs – pure and uniformed, like a lady-in-waiting to some pale, weak-chinned queen.
The days following are ones of intense cold, and there is no fog. It is the first winter where I experience dry skin and chapped lips and even internally I feel dried out, husked, cracked into platelets and shelves, like a waterless streambed. It gets so cold that our pipes freeze up and we have to put heat lamps in the well house and in the chicken coop where the water is. We have owned and raised chickens for as long as I can remember – they are terrible animals. Savage, dirty raptors in the hay and mud. Their eggs are warm and smooth and brown, and only in the dark are they tolerable, as they murmur and coo, like new mothers in a maternity ward. Because it grows dark so early now, we have to feed and water the chickens in the dark after school and work. In the lockets of darkness I'm sure there are mice watching us, pry-toothed, wriggling, cold-footed. I have only once seen a mouse up near the chicken coop, in the shed. We found it in the bottom of an empty feed barrel where it thumped at the walls like some overlarge housefly at the windowpanes. My dad went to the pharmacy and bought a little, brown bottle of ether that we still have and he put it to sleep. The rats and mice eat the chicken feed, and even sometimes the chicken eggs. Every two or three years, we find our chickens massacred by wolves or coyotes or dogs, but probably dogs. We find their bodies throughout the next week in various places, their spines cracked, their bones chapeled and half-featherless. The yard is covered with their feathers, whispery and downy as short-term memories. We used to give them proper burials, but have since resorted to double bagging them in garbage sacks and dumping them in the trash.
Winter nights have a very particular smell. The smell, perhaps, of a dead sun, as well as the smell of woodsmoke. The smell of new frost, forming spore-like on windowglass in reefs and glyphs. The smell of the nearby creek, the smell of fog. These smells remind me of a few winters ago, when I got up a six o'clock in the morning to run up and down our street before school. It would be dark, I would be tired, and in the fields the ice would glitter and refract in the ghostly lights of the sparse, oncoming traffic. The nights are full of used-to's and might-have-been's and they are very lonely.
Another indicator of winter are the birds. By early December, they gather in the trees in great treaties, black ink blots on the parchment sky, nervous and arguing and petty, rising as a silent, simultaneous body at the slightest interrupting sound, black and cloudy, as the papal smoke of indecision. The largest gathering-tree for the migratory December birds is near our garden, where dead flowers in mother's sector of the garden lay in their teasets and bulky, painted tomatoes rot and turn pink, like toothless gums. Up until Christmas day we are able to pick carrots from our garden, and onions as well. My dad takes great pride in his carrots and onions. He says that if we grew enough of them, we could be harvesting homegrown carrots until the spring. My dad is a self-preservationist. Chickens for their eggs, a garden for vegetable canning, crates and crates of peaches for more canning, hot, sticky days of homemade jams to be canned as well. He even bought solar cells so he could rig up a solar panel and power our well with it, in case of power failure. The solar cells are delicate and wafer-thin, blue and paned like dragonfly wings and just as fragile. There is gold under our house somewhere, in case the economy fails. We have 50 gallons of fresh water, we have buckets stacked up with grain and every spring we have to pick the weevils out.
The week before Christmas, we finally get some rain. The trees in the neighboring field are bony and lapsing and losing coherency, like patients of electrotherapy. I have always liked the rain. Everything is sharper – colors, smells, impressions – and the sky is less distracting. It doesn't rain often here, and when it does it is invariably light and drizzly. In the rain and the fog, the cars pass among the buildings like gravekeepers with their swinging lanterns among the headstones. The trees weep finally. In the mornings, icicles form under the eaves with the half-digested leftover wasp's nests and the pupating wasps lie in their hibernation, pale and jellied. We go Christmas caroling with our church group in the light rain with houselights caught and bored in the haze. We sing on the porches and the people open their doors timidly and watch us with half-smiles and the children peek around their mothers. When we leave, we sing “We Wish You A Merry Christmas” and it is very cold and we gather together in the dark like candles placed before a saint, with a thin, twiddling flame of song between us, and the night.
Then the baking. There is always at least one frenzied day of Christmas baking per season. Thin braids of condensed milk, little cupboarded spicejars of cloves and ginger and cinnamon and dad roaming about the kitchen like a floury specter. The oily, fingersmudged recipes flipped through like jukebox records and jazzy, big band Christmas songs playing in the living room, and by dinner time we are sick to our stomach with looted chocolate chips and icing licked off of whisks and wooden spoons. On the dining room tables, great poinsettia plants preen and turn away from us smugly, like women openly stared at in public. Their great sleeves of red leaking over the rim of the pot, dark and veined as dissected hearts. As I grow older, these baking days become lost in the moment, and recovered in retrospect. I can't taste the maple yule logs or the magic bars until after the fact, when Christmas is over, when the kitchen is clean and put away and there are no sweet smells in the air.
For our family, Christmas-time would be incomplete without a few very particular films – Miracle on 34th Street, It's A Wonderful Life, and a murky, Technicolor version of Scrooge whose script we can almost quote word for word. I think that when I leave here, I will need at least a copy of It's A Wonderful Life, which we watch on the night before Christmas. Christmas Eve is generally a sleepless night, and in the morning my parents have to shake me awake and I want to stay in bed because I know that Christmas will still under the tree in another fifteen minutes. Dad goes out to the living room before us and turns on the lights and the music while we wait in the dining room and I can't help but feel excited for the presents and the stockings along with everyone else. I squint my eyes at the Christmas tree and the lights multiply and yellow. Dad calls us out and takes a snapshot of our faces as we see the swollen gifts, which have sprung up in the night like mushrooms, and our stockings, which are so heavy that they had to be put on the couch, instead of on their hooks above the mantle. The foil wrappings and the lights and the bows and music all kind of blend together into a familiar coziness and I feel very lucky.
Christmas day is over far too quickly and the spirit of it vanishes almost immediately. The leftover decorations around town are tired and tacky now. Winter sleeps on. The birds all vanish. By January, the ice and the fog comes again and it gets dark very early and the lights in the fog are spindly and yellow and meek in their street-bound hiveminds. When the Christmas decorations come down, the house suddenly looks cheerless and barren. The ponds ice over – snow comes thinly and in a slush more than anything. The whole valley of schoolchildren prays for a snow day, or, at the very least, an ice day, and their parents look outside worriedly and check the traction in their tires. When they come down properly, the snowflakes murmur as they stick to the ground, swarming like white blood cells and we walk outside to catch them on our tongues and go dizzy looking up, up, up.
We take a walk. It is Sunday, and we walk above the vineyard, along the irrigation ditch. It rains a little. These walks have generated some of my most potent memories and walking on Sundays will always come to mind when I think about winter time. I look around. I look at the vineyard plants and the slicked back tallgrass and the ice gloating in the bottom of the ditch and the hurrying, latewinter birds and I never want any of it to change. It almost makes me want to stay here for the rest of my life, just to make sure nothing changes, or to make sure that I am there to change along with it, if it does. It makes me think about how I've spent the last eighteen years. Above all, I suppose, the fog and the rain, and the grayness of the land makes me nostalgic, as if I'm viewing everything through a greasy, grainy photograph at the bottom of a shoebox, touched so many times that the colors are all reddish-yellow. I stop for a moment and I look over the place that I've grown up in. I pull my hood closer to my face and everyone else stops with me and we are quiet, and so is everything else.
Fog clings to the valley hills, like the stages of sleep.
Good job on the whole; watch your coordination with sentences, though, because in some places -- I hope I pointed out most, if not all -- it's a trifle hard to tell what you're saying. 
