The Long Arc

The Astro van takes the loop ramp off 294 to exit the freeway at 65 mph, and my ten-year-old body pitches left, straining against the vinyl seatbelt. I love this feeling, this force I do not yet have a name for. It means we are almost to Grandpa’s house. Amy Grant sings “The Most Wonderful Time of the Year,” and outside my window the streetlights become a glowing chain of rose gold. I am being slingshotted off of the highway onto a gingerbread suburban street.

All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.¹

Decades later, the thrill of the season is gone, replaced by the relentless pull of the household orbit. I stand at the counter, loading the dishwasher for the 360th time this year, while Amy Grant sings “Night Before Christmas”. In the other room, the washing machine rocks against the tile floor, a load of bath towels unbalancing its spin cycle. With the domestic chaos barely contained, I step onto the back porch and look up into the infinite, impossibly clear night sky where stars hang brilliantly, just out of reach.

I call the dog back inside, and close the door.

As a child, I cannot describe the pull I feel toward the twinkling lights of the city, and I do not attempt to try. Instead, I wait at the door with my Walkman and headphones, ready from the tips of my patent leather Mary Janes to my wispy blond bangs. Behind me, my mom wrangles a five-year-old and an infant into their Christmas outfits, loads Pringles and fruit snacks into a Longaberger basket, and hunts down the present she bought in October and put somewhere “safe.” When we pull away from our house, I wait for the gravel to turn to blacktop, the cornfields to turn to streets, and our first of many stops before leaving the tiny town we call home. Kiss 103.1 plays Celine Dion as we fill up the tank, Gloria Estefan when my mom runs into the drug store for a new pair of pantyhose, and Michael Bolton while we slosh through the carwash.

Rinsing away the evidence of where we’ve come from.

In Chicago, everything moves faster. People are wonderfully sophisticated, living the thrilling lives I imagine for them using scenes lifted from Home Alone and the Marshall Field’s catalogue. Hours of anticipation for the intensity of too much family packed into too little house. Aunty Gayle plays “We Wish You A Merry Christmas” on a slightly-out-of-tune piano with the skill and flourish worthy of a concert hall. The kids sit in the TV room with plates of food, castaways from the warmth and noise of the big table. Grandpa reads from Luke so slowly my cousins and I melt into the sky-blue carpet.

On the drive home, I lean my head against the icy window and watch miles of polished, snow-crusted earth glow beneath the moon. Karen Carpenter is playing from the tape deck. She’s on top of the world, looking down on creation, but she’s very quiet. In the front seat, my mom and dad talk softly over her velvet voice, and beside me my younger brother and sister clutch newly opened presents in their sleep.

A star falls from the sky in a blazing arc so quickly that when I blink it is gone.

Someday I will be glamorous. I will move through the world at a pace that thrills me. I will wait for no one.

Here I am in 2025, buying more presents than my children need, spending more than I intend, playing Amy Grant on repeat, feeling my jeans grow a bit tighter with each sugar cookie, and knowing—my God, how I know—that I would not change this life for anything at all. At night, my eyes grow heavy listing gratitudes before bed. Another trip around the sun, that blazingly wonderful star reigning us all in from the vast unknowns of space.

On the day after Christmas, I wait for the moment when they’re all occupied with their new toys and pounce. There are three small suitcases to pack, a pan of cinnamon rolls to soak, tags to snip off new sweaters before wrestling them onto squirming boys. Three dozen tasks begun and only an hour to finish them. I am half walking, half sliding through the house in the new fuzzy socks lovingly gifted to me. I am doing the intricate dance of a woman so madly in love with her life that she can barely stop to look at it.

And then, when the van is all loaded up, and I glance back to pull out of the garage, I see three faces I never could have imagined, barely knew enough to hope for in those years when all I wanted was to blaze my own trail.

We pull out of the neighborhood, and their small bodies tilt in opposition to the direction I’ve turned, and I feel again the same force that once pressed me into the vinyl seatbelt of my own childhood. Millions of unexamined moments have deposited me somewhere between countryside and cityscape, between glamour and gravel roads.

Maybe the feeling of being pitched outward from the center of things was only an illusion.

We make just one stop before we get on the highway. In the early dark, I wave my phone at the Target attendant before he loads our order into the trunk. Behind me, two boys stare back with eyes like their father’s, and behind them, alone in the way back, my daughter looks out the window, where the night sky is obscured by a veil of LED lamps. The bags hold the miscellanies of all my intrusive thoughts. Inside them you’ll find the sweet assurances of extra diapers, our favorite tomato soup, another loaf of bread, body wash for dry and sensitive skin, printer paper, and a new wall calendar for 2026.

It is not for me. It is for the girl looking out the window.

Every night before bed, she draws a careful slash across the day, and every night I push away the wry analogies to a prisoner waiting to be released and accept that she is simply marking time. In the long, sometimes indistinguishable days of childhood, she is trying to understand not where, but when she is.

I have anticipated her startled realization when she tries to flip December over and finds nothing there. I am ready so that she doesn’t have to be. The unknown will last only a moment before the new page settles into place, and the next inevitable spin around the sun begins.

She’s ten years old, yearning to feel the revolution. Knowing, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that coming back to the same point year after year is as brilliant and wonderful as the counterbalance of her own body tilting left as her mother turns right.

All shall be well.

In our own ways, we brace for the pull of what lies ahead—tilting, turning, returning. The highway pulls us into orbit along its night-black tether, and we continue our long arc through the moments and places that feel like home.

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Adrienne Garrison lives in Bloomington, Indiana with her husband and their three little ones. Her essays have appeared in Coffee + Crumbs and New Millennium Writings, and her short story “No Longer Mine” was recently featured in LETTERS Journal. Adrienne believes magic takes the form of heart-to-heart conversations, petit-fours, and walks in the woods. You can find more of her writing on her website and Substack.

Photo by Jennifer Floyd.

1. from the writings of Julian of Norwich