November glows warmer when it's lit by hugs from home

By Sarah West

September 21, 2005 | November is a beautiful, graceful name for such an ugly month. While October is a painter's pallet of colors, November is the paint thinner, stripping the colors of their lives. Before it snows the trees are gray skeletons, their thin leaves blanketing the brown, desolate landscape. The leaves are broken window screens, thinning in some places, gaping holes in others. Web-like strands barely connecting the leaf to itself.

My first year away from home.

Walking to school with an itchy crimson scarf, hiding my neck from the stale air that smells like wet laundry that's been crumpled in the corner too long. There is only one smell in the beginning of November. Pure white cold. It's a poison that burns your nose just breathing it in. I'm a 5-layer cake, bundled up in so many clothes it's difficult to walk.

My favorite blue hoodie is a staple in my everyday wardrobe in November. It's too cold for anything else. A beanie covers my forehead and ears in an attempt to keep them from becoming fire engine red. It never works.

Struggling up the hill to my 8:30 class, my fingers are too numb to take notes for the first ten minutes. My hands can't grip the pen and it falls to the floor.

Although Christmas is a month away, people are decorating for the season. Red, green, and white lights line the streets reminding me of my home street and even the crazy Porters next door who always put their decorations up before Halloween.

Hot rich creamy chocolate with mini marshmallows finally tastes good again in November. Although there weren't many good memories I can remember that November, curling up in a blanket with a cup of cocoa watching Waiting for Guffman with my roommate on a Sunday morning was one of them.

The first snowfall, even though it isn't much, is enough for the neighborhood kids to make snowmen a few inches tall, just like my brothers and I used to.

When it snows, it's not enough to muffle my footsteps, just barely enough to imprint "Vans" into the white fluff on the sidewalk. The yellowed grass poke their heads out of the snow, like a groundhog checking to see if it's spring yet. They are always disappointed. But even a little snow is enough to make people drive like maniacs. My roommate's maroon Honda Accord with bald tires and enough dents in it that another wouldn't matter, slammed into the back of a Land Cruiser. This is how November went.

Traveling through the barren canyon, feeling bad for the cows dotting the hills. It's dull in November with nothing pretty to look at. The reappearing lake has been gone since August, leaving dead plants smothered in frost behind. If this scene was a painting, it'd be depressing.

When I got my first cold of the season, I missed the comforts of home: Mom letting me sleep in, making me tomato soup and grilled cheese sandwiches, and renting me all the movies I wanted. Now I was away. I had to take care of myself.

The missing doesn't hit me until the end of the month. Then it hits me hard in the stomach stealing my air, like the time I fell off my purple Huffy bike landing flat on the black speckled pavement. I was doing so good at school, with no homesickness. Until now. The beginnings of my first family holiday away from home.

Working right up to the day before Thanksgiving, watching moms and grandmas buy bread and rolls to take home to their families for Thanksgiving dinner, while mine was back home, roasting marshmallows in the fire pit, throwing the blackened ones back because I'm not there to eat them.

On the drive home, it was no longer the excitement of the pistachio pudding, lemon pepper asparagus, and cranberry sauce that made me speed down the curves of the canyon, but the perky girl in the passenger seat next to me. Jodie. She needed a ride home for Thanksgiving. I never liked her at work, but being alone with her chipper high-pitched voice would be torture for the next hour and half. At least I have the CD player. I could drown her out with Radiohead. But she asked to have no music; she'd rather talk instead. It was at that moment I would've given anything to be surrounded by people I'd known my whole life.

When I finally got home everyone had gone to a movie, but Mom was there waiting for me, like she always had when I'd get home from school. She gave me a bear hug and sat me down at the table with a plate full of my favorite peppermint cheesecake. I never really understood the saying, "You never know what you've got until you've lost it." I hadn't really lost my mother, or my family, but in a way I felt I had because I had been apart from them.

Almost feeling like a stranger, I asked, "Mom, can I stay the night?"

She must have sensed my desperation because she replied, "The good thing about having a home is you don't need to ask to stay. This is your home, and it always will be."

I used to think November was the ugliest month.

NW
SA