Christmas Eve used to smell like pine and ham glaze and whatever candle my mother insisted was “the real scent of the season.” It used to sound like a house settling into warmth, music humming low in the background, silverware clinking, someone laughing in the kitchen.
That year, it smelled like exhaust and snow and the stale rubber of my truck’s floor mats.
I sat at the end of my father’s driveway with my headlights off, hands still on the steering wheel as if my body hadn’t received the update that I’d arrived.
The engine was silent, but the heat from the drive lingered, fogging the edges of the windshield. Snow drifted sideways across the hood, thin flakes spiraling in the weak beam of the porch light.
It wasn’t a blizzard, nothing dramatic enough to feel like a sign. Just a steady December cold, wind cutting across the Colorado plains, the kind of weather that makes you hunch your shoulders and keep moving.
I had driven two hours through it anyway.
Hope will make you do stupid things.
