The Reindeer Keeper

At an early age I was aware the big box thing sitting in my parents' bedroom was called a cedar chest. I even knew it was made out of mahogany. I didn't understand what any of that meant. But I did understand how much it meant to my mother because she told me it was where she kept her favorite things. When you tell a kid that, curiosity sets in. I know it did with me. Every year, somewhere between spring and summer, my mother spent a Sunday afternoon gathering her good sweaters. There were quite a few of them. My mother loved sweaters. She'd wash the sweaters one at a time in Woolite-then spread each one out on the kitchen table on top of a towel. Once she had a sweater just as she wanted it, she'd roll it up in the towel and go to the next. After she'd rolled the last one, she'd set the towels with the sweaters on the dining room table to dry. Then a few days later she'd unroll the sweaters. If need be they were put outside on clothes bars to dry some ...

                        My mother always said you spend the summer getting ready for winter. That never made any sense to me when I was growing up. I didn't connect the dots-between the clearing of gardens and washing of windows inside and out and the replacing of screens with storm windows and the fixing up going on-with the changing of the season. I never realized the sheets, along with sweaters washed in Woolite and blankets taken out of cedar chests and anything else that had been packed away in mothballs, were on the clothes line probably for the last time until tulips and daffodils announced the next season's impending arrival. I never questioned the picnic table and enamel chairs disappearing from the back yard as leaves swirled about. I guess I thought boots and mittens, scarves and snowsuits just appeared from nowhere as bikes and rolle...