Christmas at MomMom’s House
He doth nothing talk of but his horse. –Shakespeare
We went back to our regular life Downstate: school, birthday parties, Scouts, Hallowe’en, Thanksgiving. I told everybody in my class about Sam and the great times we had on the farm, and invited my best friend Liz Hodges to come up sometime.
“All you care about anymore is your horse and that dumb farm,” she said.
“All you talk about anymore is boys,” I said back. We stayed friends, but now that I was deep in my Horse Phase I was not going to come out of it any time soon.
I went to see my old riding pals and take a lesson over at Fox Hill, paying for it by mucking out and cleaning tack, but after that one time I stopped going. Holly Cooper had her own horse now, and she was off competing in shows; and besides, Mrs. Ackerl told me she didn’t approve of my horsemanship.
“You’ve been riding bareback,” she said.
I hung my head and said Well, yes I had.
“You have ruined your form. Your seat is deep, the hands are light, but the legs, horrible! Can’t you get your heels down? How will you ever get your horse to move forward?”
I don’t know, I said. Getting Sam to move forward was not a problem that had come up, except that once. And I didn’t care about trotting round and round in a dusty old arena. The schoolie I was riding shuffled like he was half asleep, not like Sam rumbling and thundering across the top of Amon Hen with the wind in our hair. I didn’t want to ride any other horse but Sam.
Even Christmas seemed kind of dull that year. Except for Christmas Day, when we all gathered at MomMom’s for one of her delicious dinners. And of course our traditional Christmas family fun and games. After MomMom’s perfect turkey and gravy and heavenly whipped potatoes, and MomMom’s special greenbeans and boiled onions, and angel food cake with strawberries and whipped cream, Dad would lean back in his chair and start spreading Christmas cheer by comparing his MomMom’s cooking to Mom’s.
“Mother, what can I say, you’re a GREAT. GREAT. COOK. Almost as good as Joanie here.” Mom would duck her head and tell Dad softly that she didn’t need to be reminded about how she didn’t measure up to MomMom. Sometimes Dad would stop at that, and sometimes he’d switch over to his other traditional Yuletide story, which was about his college girl friend. He would talk about this beautiful girl he met on a ski trip on Christmas vacation his senior year, and how MomMom had just loved her and hoped he would marry her.
“Gee, every year about this time I think…maybe I should have listened to my Mother’s advice and married her after all, ha ha,” Dad would say. “But then I met Joan, and she acted so desperate to get herself a man that I took pity on her and married her instead.”
Then everybody would laugh, me included, and Mom would cry and run out of the room. But this year I finally understood how she felt. Because I now knew what the term “yarning around” meant. I had seen Rufus do it. I had it done to me by Wayne Pilcher. I had done it myself. If I had been Mom I would have thrown a plateful of MomMom’s perfect food right in Dad’s face.
On the other hand I got a wonderful Christmas present; MomMom made good on her threat to buy me a saddle. She presented it to me after dinner, when we were opening presents. She told us she never wanted to see us riding bareback like savages again, and PopPop threatened to take the saddle back if we didn’t keep it in perfect condition.
“And,” PopPop said, “I want you both to work to become the best riders in the State. Why bother doing anything unless you are Number One?”
“That means there would only be one person in the State riding,” I said.
“Don’t you give any backtalk to your grandfather on Christmas,” said Dad. “Or there won’t be even one person riding.”
“And she will get her mouth washed out with soap,” added MomMom.
Mom didn’t say anything. She was in the bathroom again. Maybe she had had enough yarning around to last until next Christmas.
On Christmas Night I lay in bed wondering what the Farm looked like in the snow, and whether Frenchy and Injun John were having Christmas dinner at Willett’s or were they nestled all snug in their bus halfway up Argue Mountain. What were Jinnae and Byron and She and the Pilchers and all the horses doing to spread Christmas Cheer?