The Reindeer Keeper

When I was growing up, most Christmas presents were wrapped and sealed together with Christmas stickers instead of scotch tape. After all, it was Christmas. Those stickers looked more like Christmas than strips of sticky cellophane tape. But they didn't stick as good as the tape. My mother had a specific box in which she kept gift tags and Christmas stickers. I loved going through them and hinting which ones I liked the most. Getting the right stickers on one's gifts was quite important. I'm sure my mother thought so too. Besides making gifts look like Christmas, there was another reason why I loved it when my mother used her Christmas stickers. You see, depending how many she put on the tissue paper to keep a gift sealed until Christmas morning and depending on if she was in a hurry putting the stickers in place, some of the stickers weren't sealed as tightly as needed. After a while, some would pop right up. Others would still stay in place until gently encouraged to

  When I was little and I didn’t feel good, my mother would take me to a particular doctor. While I didn’t like going to see the doctor, a big cabinet sitting in his office with lots of small drawers would distract me. There were so many drawers. Little spaces for little things. Spaces to put things in. Hide things. Arrange things. Each had a label. I couldn’t read so I never knew what any of the labels said but it didn’t matter. My imagination took over. Once I reached a certain age, my doctor changed. But my infatuation for such small spaces remained. When I was going into the fourth grade, we moved to the country and playing in my grandfather’s barn with my cousins became a constant. By then, my grandfather had stopped farming. Gone were the cows and horses— and the chickens. Left behind were the small, three-sided nesting boxes where the chickens would lay their eggs. The boxes remained intact. Some still had a bit of hay and a fe