December Nights at the Kitchen Table

By the second week of December, the lamp has its place on the kitchen table. It is a short red metal lamp with a chip in the base and a white glass chimney, and the wick is trimmed every Sunday. We have a perfectly good ceiling light above the table—a two-bulb fixture that throws a flat, honest light—but from the first of the month we keep the lamp lit at the evening meal and after it.

The ceiling light stays dark. It is not a matter of saving electricity. It is more that the lamp makes the room smaller, rounds it, turns it from a kitchen into a lantern. When the dark comes in at four-thirty, the lamp is our answer to it.

Outside, the month has been building toward this for weeks. The garden is a mounded row of brown, frozen clods. The bird feeder empties in two days. The driveway gravel is mixed with snow and cinders, and every passing truck on the county road sounds different with the air thick and cold.

By the second week, the low sun does not climb much past the roofline of the barn. The shadows are long by three. The house settles and groans in the wind. But inside, the lamp does its work. Its little flame draws the whole household toward the table.

The Thursday Table

On Thursday evenings, Ed comes up the back steps. He is the man who lives in the gray house a mile down the road, and he has not once knocked, only stomped his boots and come in. He sets his darning egg on the table—it is his father's, a dark wooden thing shaped like a hen's egg, with a handle—and takes the chair closest to the stove.

My wife brings out the basket of mending. I bring out the small canvas bag of library books. For two hours the three of us do the work of late fall and early winter, the handwork that has waited all week.

Ed darns the wool socks he will wear to the Christmas program at the church. My wife has three mitten bodies in progress, each with a different color of cuff. I read to them. That year the book was a thick, ordinary novel about a man who took a boat up a long Alaskan river, searching for somebody.

I can still see the moon in that story, and the pale stubble on the riverbanks, but I could not tell you the title. It did not matter. What mattered was the sound of it in the room, the way I had to raise my voice over the wind when the weather kicked up.

My wife's needles ticked. Ed's needle made a dull push and pull through the wool. The dog, old and deaf, slept through it all under the table, his chin on my foot. When the furnace came on, we all paused and listened, as if it were another reader turning a page.

The Month's Quiet Labors

On nights with no company, the lamp is still lit, and the work continues. The work has its own calendar. Early in the month, my wife is knitting new mittens for the grandchildren; they must be ready for the school bus by the first deep snow, but the first deep snow does not always wait. So the knitting has a deadline, and that gives the evenings an edge.

Later in the month, the mending is all about making things last: the cuff of a jacket, the strap of a canvas bag, a seam on a pair of pants that split at the knee. I have learned to use a needle myself, though I am slow and the stitches are ugly. There is a real pleasure in holding a repaired sock up to the lamp at the end, seeing the light come through the darn.

Often the radio is on, low, picking up a station from a hundred miles away. We only listen when the music is familiar. My wife says December evenings sound different—the furnace hums longer, the wind has a higher whistle around the chimney, and the words of the radio announcer have a slower pace than in June. It is all the same to me, but I don't say so.

Sometimes the reading gives way to talk about the practical month: the snow tires that came from town, the load of firewood that should have been split before Thanksgiving, the recipe for the morning buns that my wife makes on the darkest weekday mornings. We talk about what the mail brought—Christmas cards, seed catalogs that arrive too early, a thin envelope that might be anything. Then the talk tapers, and the needles take up again.

The Night the Power Went Out

In the third week of December, a wet snow came in hard and took the power lines down sometime after midnight. I woke to the roar of nothing—no furnace, no refrigerator, no clock. The house was dark as an attic. But we were not worried.

We had the lamp, of course, and the candles, and the wood stove had been banked the night before. In the morning, my wife melted snow for coffee and I hauled a few armloads of split wood from the porch. The house was cold enough that our breath showed, but the stove made a square of warmth in the kitchen.

At evening, Ed came through the drifts to see if we were all right, which was ridiculous because his own house was a mile farther down the same unplowed road. He brought a quart of chili, thick with beans, and we ate it by the wood stove, the lamp on the table squared for company.

Afterward, with the lights still out, Ed asked if he could try reading to us. He read from the same library book, his voice slower and rougher than mine, but the story fitted the dark. The wind worked at the eaves. The dog stayed closer to the stove. We passed a cup of cocoa around.

The power came back around midnight, but by then we were all asleep, my wife and I in our coats and Ed in the old rocker, the lamp still burning low because no one had blown it out.

The Turning of the Dark

The next day, the lights were back, though the furnace coughed for a while. It was the day after the solstice, and the sun set just a little later than the day before. Ed stood on the porch and pointed it out, or tried to—the sun was already below the hill by the time he spoke. We took the small gain as a kind of gift. The month's longest nights were behind us, and the evenings would only loosen from here.

But the dark does not leave quietly, and neither did our evenings. There were still the last days before Christmas, wrappings and baling twine, the sugar cookies, the drive to town for the service. The lamp stayed on. The table stayed crowded.

On Christmas Eve, after my wife and I had come home from the church, I lit the lamp before I turned on any other light. The three of us—my wife, the dog, and I—sat at the table a while, not saying much. Outside, the snow lay in pale drifts under the thin moon. Heat climbed the stairwell. We were not in a hurry.

December had given us what it gives every year if we are there to take it: dark, a lamp, and enough time to sit together while the night went out.