She hated North Carolina in the winter. All the trees were bare; just bony wooden skeletons to stare down at her in dispair, threatening her with their claws. The brown rolling hills were increasingly torn up, revealing the red clay beneath, in preparation for yet another new housing subdivision that would no doubt be built by next Autumn, foundation-to-rooftop. The cars packed into tiny parking lots around the dozens of churches sprinkled along the main 2-lane into town. She hated North Carolina, period, but it was always worse in the winter because that meant it was the holidays and another visit to her parent's house. Pain was too simplistic a word to use when describing the feelings that came with when visiting her folks these days. It was an odd mixture of sadness, melancholy, regret, longing and an odd embarassment brought on by her own inability to communicate any of the above. She loved her parents, she supposed, but no one prepared her for the mix of emotions she felt as they sunk into their aged bones, beset by their various ilnnesses, and prepared, slowly and with their usual lack of consciousness, to die. She felt guilty that she'd never worked out so many lingering issues that hung over the family, feeling that it was too late. Why saddle their aged minds with the torture of guilt? And were they any more guilty than most parents born in the early part of the 20th Century?

She says parents, even though it's actually her dad and her step-mom. Dad was turning 75 this year, and while one would hope that he'd be cared for in his later years by his far younger wife - she'd just turned 59 - it didn't quite turn out that way. She'd recently been diagnosed with frontal lobe dimentia, a mysterious disease that rapidly deteriorates the frontal lobe of the brain. This was the region of reason and calculation, of logic and understanding. The atrophy of this lobe meant the erosion of her abilities to function, a highly stressful situation for anyone to be sure, but more so in someone who took immense pride in their grasp of common sense logic like her step-mom.

So here it was, Christmas, and the entire family was gathering for what was whispered to be her step-mother's last hurrah. Her brothers were showing up for the first time in years - baby brother Joe, a stoner wannabe rock band burnout with a job managing a Foster's Freeze in Piedmont, California, and Bill, her uptight conservative Christian construction foreman older brother on his 3rd wife - so it was shaping up to be an interesting holiday. She'd considered lying to her father about not being able to get the time off work, but he was buying the plane ticket and the tone of this voice told her that he really needed her there. It was strange, hearing him so desperate, this man who'd been a pillar of stability her entire life. His quivering voice on the phone last Tuesday sounded like a scared little boy, and made her feel like a mother - his.

She pulled her rental car to a stop at the curb across the street from her parent's house, letting it idle to keep the heat on. The Christmas lights had been strung across the garage and over the top of the front porch. The latest lights - the kind that dangled little strands of white lights to look like icicles - not the old fashioned big-bulb multi-colored jobs. It was important for them to keep up with the Joneses, especially with the Christmas decorations, for in tight-knit little suburban communities like this, nothing communicated WHO YOU WERE more than the junky bric-a-brac you laid out across your lawn for whatever holiday. The latest coffin-with-vampire for Halloween; a gigantic animatronic white bunny rabbit carrying a basket for Easter; an enormous American flag for the 4th of July; and this Christmas, it was all about the faux wrapped oversized gifts that were lit and placed around the lawn as if a two-story tall Santa were delivering presents for gigantic children. The additional horror here was that her step-mom bought everything Disney, from the Christmas china to the balls hung on the tree. Mickey and Donald and Goofie stalked her everywhere, every time she came, but never more so than at Christmas.

She saw her step-mom step out the front door, bundled in a jacket and wearing her thick house slippers, to sneak a cigarette, something her father hated especially now that it seemed like it contributed to her condition. How could she smoke when each inhale contributed to the further erosion of her brain, he thought. "The first thing I'd do is quit," he whispered to her one night over the phone. Easy for him to say; she sat in her idling car and snuffed out her own cigarette, vowing to quit before her own brain started to show signs of dimentia. Or should she say MORE signs?