Hanging in between my dining room and den are a set of five
bells dangling from a fake green log. When
I was a child in the Yukon we used to hang the bells on the front door so
whenever the door opened and closed for visitors we heard tinkling. There was
one evening when I was five and my sister seven that she and I heard the bells
late at night Christmas eve and came running down from our bedroom to the front
door. We looked out through the porthole
window and saw Santa and his reindeer silhouetted in front of the full moon.
I am a long way from my childhood home and from that time of
magic when anything is possible yet the first day I hung the bells in New
Brunswick after putting the tree up I had left the storage boxes piled up on
each other near this by-way between two rooms. I was upstairs, my son was at
school, and my husband was in his office, when I heard the bells. I came down to see the bells rocking and
tinkling. The cat, Milo, was walking
away nonchalantly. But I don’t know how
he could have reached up the remaining four feet between the top of the boxes
and the bottom of the bells, unless he made a great jump and spiked the bells
on his way down. And the picture of Milo catapulted in to the air, paws stretched
out in front, and aimed for the object of his intense curiosity is enough to
remind me that anything is still possible.
