Where Are My Feety Pajamas?

The following was written in response to this week's Red Writing Hood writing prompt from the Write on Edge blog. Here's the prompt from this week:

We’d like you to craft a piece of fiction or creative non-fiction around the holiday season... The piece should begin with “The doorbell rang” and end with “snow began to fall.”The middle is up to you, and the entire thing should be under 300 words.

That which follows is creative nonfiction. It is an amalgam of holiday/family gatherings from the last couple of years. 
 

The doorbell rang, or tried to. It's been on the "fix-list" for months, it makes a fractured buzz that only the dogs and I can identify as "doorbell." I run to the door hoping to get it open before my brother clutches the doorknob.

I don't make it.

"What the hell?" I hear his frustration before I see his crimson face. I don't want to laugh, but it's all I can do to keep my sanity in this house that is crumbling under my watch.

"Forgot to tell you," I say as he hands me the doorknob in a huff, "Doorknob's broken."

"I don't even want to talk about it," he says. No, the house is not perfect yet... , I think, wondering what other open sores he'll find in our childhood home.

I turn to the cooking, hoping everyone will enjoy the fabulous feast I'm preparing.

We laugh, eat and I notice the table is getting more crowded every year, even though I still feel the emptiness. We watch movies, play games and do all the things we used to do in the basement while the "grown ups" played poker and drank cordials upstairs.

At some point, after dessert, after too much wine, someone says, "I guess we're the grown ups now, huh?"

"Do you think they were as clueless as we are?" I ask.

"I can't think of any reason why they wouldn't be," my cousin says.

My brother adds, "Our parents were older."

"Sorry, dude, we're old," I remind him.

We fall silent. I'm about to submit to the weightiness of my reaffirmed adulthood status when I glance out the window and burst into a good old fashioned Snoopy dance.

My husband points out what I saw:

 snow 

began 

to 

fall.