The Package at my Door

By Carol Gillis Zetterberg

The box was on the front porch when I drove home from doing some errands. I saw it as the car crunched down the driveway toward the garage behind the house.

Probably just the auto part Larry ordered, I thought. I parked the car and hurried through the back door. My breath steamed in the sharp January air. I meant to go outside and bring the box in, but my boys, Forrest and Christian, burst into the living room, roughhousing.

"Boys! Enough!" I said.

Christian grinned. "Mom, have I given you your New Year's hug yet?" Before I could answer, he wrapped his long teenage arms around me and hoisted me off my feet and into the air. 

"Oof! How did you get so big?" I said. He put me down. "Listen, you two. Make yourselves useful. Help me take down the Christmas tree." We looked at it. Its fresh smell had faded. Dry needles littered the floor underneath. The pine boughs on the mantel were dead. The gifts had been opened and were gone. Well, almost all the gifts. One had never come from my dad. As the boys tackled each other and fell to the floor laughing, I stood lost in thought. Is he all right? I wondered. It's so unlike him. I could have called and asked, but we had just talked a few days before.

My dad lived in Oregon, a world away from our snowy Pennsylvania home. But he always sent something at Christmas, especially since my birthday was December 30. The gifts were his way of bridging the miles between us. 

When I married Larry, a Navy pilot, I gained a wonderful man but lost any hope of staying near home. I transferred colleges six times before graduating, and it wasn't until Larry got a job flying commercial planes that we settled near Philadelphia, where he was based.

Dad's gifts were like quirky, thoughtful messages from my childhood. One year he sent arrowheads—and I remembered the zest for the outdoors he instilled in me and my brothers and sister. Another year brought a stone veined with glittering mica—that was his fascination with geology. Sometimes he even sent copies of his educational research—a strange gift, I know, but a perfect embodiment of his love of knowledge and respect for schooling. 

The gifts had always come without fail. But this year Dad was 85, living alone and using a cane. Mom had died several years before, and my siblings were grown and scattered too. I surveyed the mess in the living room. Maybe I'll call him again when I get this house straightened out. I rounded up the boys and we began stripping the tree of ornaments. I tried not to worry. But I couldn't help thinking, “There's going to come a year when no gift arrives from Dad, isn't there, Lord? Please, not this year. I'm not ready!” 

As I cradled each ornament and lay it in a box, I thought of Christmases past. Most years, in the week between Christmas and New Year's Day, Dad would drive us over the coastal mountains from our home in Oregon's Willamette Valley to a beach called Netart's Bay, where we rented a cabin at a place called Happy Camp. How I loved spending my birthdays there. The cabins were small and smelled of age and the sea. 

When we arrived, Dad would start a fire and Mom would fiddle with the unpredictable stove. My brothers, David and Vincent, would pull out board games. My sister, Twila, would set the table. When dinner was done, we would all pile into old, lumpy beds with a vaguely musty smell. The sheets would be cold. But I would kick my legs and cover my head, and soon I would fall fast asleep.

My whole childhood was like that—Dad at the center of our adventures. He was a strong man, always working, always puzzling. His father, a road builder who had immigrated from Scotland, discouraged him from going to college. "Every time I hire someone from college, they just sit on their rear end," he said. 

But Dad went anyway, to Oregon State in Corvallis, and studied forestry. He became a teacher, a principal, a superintendent and finally a director of counseling for a school district. "You're a champion," he liked to tell kids. When students struggled, he would spend hours researching ways to help them succeed. He once invented a device—a three-foot-square chart with pull strings—that precisely matched textbooks to each child's skills.

He loved to tell stories. My favorites were about two wild horses, Strawberry and Streak. Early in his career, Dad had taught at a school in the high desert of eastern Oregon, where wild horses still roamed. The adventures of Strawberry and Streak ranged all over the state. Once, he told how the two friends wandered down from the desert all the way to the beach. "They had never seen the ocean before," Dad said, and I pictured a glossy stallion and mare gazing at the wild gray sea, twitching their tails. Strawberry grew curious and waded out a little too far. An octopus reached from the depths and grabbed him. "But don't worry," Dad said, seeing my eyes widen in alarm. "Streak raced in after her friend and pulled him by the tail from the octopus's clutches." 

Good old Strawberry and Streak. They even rescued me once, when a surprise storm rolled into Happy Camp from the west, frosting the beach with a carpet of snow. Worried the roads might become impassable, Dad bustled us into the car and drove inland, through the mountains. From my perch in the backseat, I clutched my doll Ginny and watched the wiper blades shove wet snow from the windshield. Most other dolls in my tomboy childhood were left lying in the chicken coop or the cattail marsh. But Ginny, a Christmas present a few days before, was special, a girl about my age, with blonde braids and a spirit of adventure. At the beach I had shown her how to stick a finger in a sea anemone and snap ropy seaweed like a lion tamer. Now she sat on my lap, staring with me out the window as the snow deepened at the side of the road.

"C'mon, Nellie!" Dad urged our old Frazer. He gripped the wheel, swerving through thick drifts. Suddenly, the rear of the car fishtailed, and we slid off the road with a lurch. Everyone leaped out, put hands to freezing metal and shoved the car back onto the pavement. Miles later, the snow lightened, then stopped. I reached for Ginny to tell her everything was all right—but she wasn't there. We searched the seats and the floor. But I knew. She had fallen out when we had jumped out to push the car from the snow. We couldn't go back. The drifts were too deep, and she would be invisible beneath a thick blanket of white. Ginny was gone forever.

Then, through my snuffles, I heard Dad say, "Did I ever tell you the story about the time Strawberry and Streak got lost in the desert?" I sat up, wiped my eyes and listened as the two horses swished past sagebrush and juniper under a punishing sun. Soon, my head fell back against the seat, and I slept.

Come on, Carol, I said to myself now, looking around the living room. You can't live in the past. I closed up the Christmas boxes and asked the boys to take them to the attic. Larry wrestled the tree out, and I ran the vacuum, hardly noticing as the needles spindled up the tube. When I turned the vacuum off, the room rang with silence. The corner where the tree had stood was now bare. The holidays were over. A prayer welled within me. Please, Lord, don't let me lose Dad too.

Larry came in from the front porch with the box. He set it on the table. "Your car part?" I asked listlessly.

Larry smiled. "Nope. It's for you." The package was wrapped in torn, wrinkled brown paper, addressed in Dad's handwriting. My heart leaped.

The boys returned from the attic. "Is that from Grandpa?" Christian asked. 

"If it's more arrowheads, I get them!" Forrest tackled him and pushed him to the sofa.

I ignored the horseplay and carefully cut away the brown paper. I pried open the box. Inside was a doll. I lifted it out. It was a young girl, about eight years old, with curly blonde hair that could be done up in braids. Before I could look closer, I noticed a few sheets of paper that had fluttered to the floor. I picked them up. A poem was written on them. It told of an old man with a cane climbing with difficulty into his equally old van and driving to a store in search of a special doll—a doll that looked like a little girl with blonde hair. A doll to replace another doll lost long ago in the Oregon snow. The boys had stopped roughhousing and were standing beside me. Larry put his arm around me.

"What is it, Mom?" Forrest asked. 

I thought of Streak pulling Strawberry to safety. “It's a gift, sweetheart," I said. "From your grandfather." The boys looked at the doll for a moment, a little bemused, then moved on to something else. 

“You gave me such a wonderful father, Lord. Thank you. Someday I know I will have to let him come home to you. But you will always be by my side—the best gift of all.” I held the doll in my hands for a long time, letting the memories come back. Then I walked toward the phone.