Non-fiction

"Promise of the Morning" by Jack Treyball

I was ten, too excited to sleep. Sandwiched by a comforting warmth, my sleeping sisters, but struggling to keep still with the promise of the morning. “Just don’t wake them” was my only concern. Earlier, we had orchestrated our annual caroling session, recorded on a Macbook as heavy as myself. “I can’t wait to have my own Macbook,” I thought; maybe it would come with that promise of the morning. The moon’s spotlight shone through the curtains, white as the snow it reflected off, the same snow that we shaped ourselves into as angles earlier that day, or flew through on the toboggan, careless like the frostbitten wind. I was exhausted from such exertion but stimulated with that promise of the morning. Closing my eyes that night, I drifted through the white darkness, imagining the morning’s transformation: the warm scent of buttery popovers—Pops’ specialty—gifts under the tree, smiling faces of family seen that one week a year, that promise of the morning. “Mhm,” I would sigh in the content of my youth. My face was flushed by the intense heat of the snoring, crackling woodstove; I was on top of the blankets, having missed my chance before my sisters matched its sound. Flushed day and night, having raced against the wind which danced quietly with gentle flurries, and yet now, “I’m glad.” The door was the only thing that separated me from that promise of the morning, lit by the underglow of the tree. The creaking floors were carved from hands stronger than the axe that cut them, Pops’, who nibbled on cookies burnt by my innocence, stocking a tree under an alias many parents identified with that night.

That one week a year was like an exhale to a much-needed sigh, inhaling all those other weeks in anticipation for that promise of the morning. I would run through those empty rooms with exhilarating imagination, but even better that night, “I don’t have to imagine,” my family filling those rooms together under one snow-insulated roof. Coming from all around: New York, North Carolina, across the country from California, I didn’t have to imagine that night. Inhaling sharply these weeks, months, now years since Pops passed. It, too, has been years since I saw those rare family faces, since the snow has been streaked with the blip of laughter racing down the hill, since the floors have creaked under his weight. Our hearts are hungry like the woodstove without him. The last Christmas, seven years after that night I lay cradled between my sisters, the doctors had already given him his sentence. “Six months,” outlived by over a year, he held it together, defiant towards the promise of the morning. Eating soft, chocolaty cookies together, outside that door which years ago was the gateway to my world, we stood, our faces flushed by the heat of our happiness. Time with him, the promise of another morning, had become the greatest gift of all, and yet it also terrified me, worried about when that morning would be our last.

The cancer grew in his body, but his spirit remained the humble, strong stone smith I knew him as, bellied and loving; he was my Saint Nick. All my life, and for all of his that I knew, Pops was a before-the-sun morning person. He woke up to “hear the birds yawning,” he’d tell me. In those winters, however, no birds were singing. Those dark December mornings, the floors would awaken on his way to the woodstove. He was providing a morning of warmth, his promise as a father. He granted the world around me, of popovers, an initial push on the toboggan, the glow beneath the door all those years ago. When I hear his beloved birds now, I hear him, too, strong and free in the winds that flushed my face. I’m a morning person today, not yet having to make a morning fire, but instead, I listen to the yawning birds with my coffee, my source of warmth, both from the cup and his voice in the air.