That summer, one of the exhibits at the sculpture garden was a palace of steel beams and translucent bead curtains. At night, they lit the beads from below so that the whole structure shimmered like costume jewelry.

My mother’s theory was that the man I met there was married. That’s why he stopped calling. He was tall and blonde and blue-eyed with meticulously ironed shirts, and our first date, after this meeting, was on the Fourth of July. In the first few minutes of our first date we realized we didn’t have any bug spray, so we stopped by a skyscraper in downtown Minneapolis and he placed his index finger in front of a sensor; that’s when the elevator shot us up to the eighteenth floor.

“I just work for a company that happens to makes bug spray,” he said, handing me a bottle with a gleaming smile. “OFF?” I read. “Seriously? What do you do for –” “We should go,” he said, ushering me back into the elevator. Wooosh.

Later we’d meet up at my parents’ house and walked to the Interlachen Country Club in a giant rowdy caravan of relatives and kids. He’d play leap-frog with the children and drape a crisp linen jacket over my shoulders. When we laid our heads onto the velvet green of the golf course, fireworks burst overhead like violent magnolias. That was our first date.

Don’t we sound rich?

Rich and beautiful?

I usually wore boys’ t-shirts (size medium, from the Goodwill) in those days, but that night I wore a pale blue skirt with pink flowers and a sweet-buttoned cardigan.

“He’s very handsome,” everyone said slyly. “Where’d you find this guy?”

“Oh, you know. In the sculpture garden at midnight,” I replied.

When I was a little girl, it annoyed me that my mother sang so often. Cooking banana bread, doing the dishes, making her way around the house: her voice floated through the freshly-painted rooms like a cloud of golden pollen. The songs she sang were ancient and full of imagery — all of them songs I’ve never heard since, with topics concerning the moon, saying grace, and royal women mistaken for swans in the forest, pierced by the hunting arrow of their lovers. She never trailed off or faded out. She didn’t falter on a single word or note.

I wondered how she could bear being loud like that, making everyone aware of her presence. As a child, I was anxiously quiet. I would close the door to my room and knit my brow, attempt to read. I worried that my friends would walk by and hear her.

As we grew up, my mother sang around the house less and less. Now I’m around the house less and less: some years only for a week or so around Christmas. This year a cousin of mine was getting married, and we were going to meet up in Little Rock for a few days instead of St. Paul: but on the day we were scheduled to leave, it wound up snowing a few inches in Boston and antagonizing everyone on the East Coast so thoroughly that all domestic flights were cancelled.

Jurvis and I got on the phone with our travel agent (because travel agents are amazing and completely worth their thirty dollar booking fee — even for part-time public radio employees). But Bob couldn’t help us on Friday. “There’s just . . . nothing,” he said. “I mean, if you want to put down another eighty bucks to guarantee you a seat on a flight tomorrow, we could arrange that, but to be honest, I think those flights are going to get cancelled too.” He looked up Amtrak schedules and Greyhounds: we briefly discussed the option of renting a car and driving the whole way. “Yeah, no, I guess that’s farther than I thought,” he sighed. “If you drove for twenty-two hours straight, with no breaks for sleeping or eating, and also taking for granted that weather conditions would be ideal — you might make it in time for the reception.”

I was standing on the Charles/MGH subway platform when we were trying to figure all of this out, a flurry of tiny snowflakes spinning around our hunched shoulders while the river hid glassily somewhere below. Cars weaved across the bridge. Every five minutes the red line roared by and I couldn’t hear a word he said. “Should we get back on the train, then?” I shouted at Bob. “Should we be heading to the airport, to arrange this in person?”

He thought this would be the best idea considering the craziness, yes. When we got off the phone, I stood there for a moment, staring into the dizzy white air. “I’m not going to make this wedding,” I realized.

Every Christmas since I’ve left home, I have stood next to my mother on Christmas Eve and sang with her. Unitarian services at first, then the family majority voted Lutheran, but I would always make sure to elbow stepbrothers, children and boyfriends out of my way so that I would be right next to her, and the confident pleasure of her voice. It presses into your palm, cues your turns, so that suddenly everything seems effortless and you’re wondering how you just did that: and then she begins harmonizing with you and you think everyone else should just quiet down for a moment so that they can appreciate the two of you, singing like that.

She called me on Christmas Eve, but I was in a used book store, hunting down old science fiction for my boyfriend, and told her I couldn’t talk right then. I called her back late on Christmas day.

“Mom, I had to sing without you last night,” I said. “It was terrible. I realized I don’t know how.”

It’s a dark and stormy night in North Saint Paul, and I am alone in a guest bedroom. Sleeping by myself during weather like this would probably bother me if I hadn’t spent the majority of my childhood rereading A Wrinkle In Time. Our copy resided at my dad’s old house, where my sister and I slept on a foldout couch in a cozy, amber-lit basement. Every time it rained, I huddled under the pink comforter and read the first chapter, Paige snoozing next to me as thunder shook the yard.

These days, the worse the weather gets, the more I am comforted. I could pad out to the kitchen right now, and I’m pretty sure Charles Wallace would be sitting at the table in faded blue Dr. Dentons, warming some cocoa on the stove. A grey fluff of a kitten yawns luxuriously in the attic. A strange woman knocks at the door. Anything could happen, and everything will be all right.

For seven years, I’ve been in a long-distance relationship with Minneapolis. Holidays were never long enough. I eagerly plotted my return, the neighborhood I would live in, the books I would carry to rose garden picnics. I networked. I made long-term plans with friends. My ballots have been absentee for my entire voting life, my direct deposits traveling halfway across the continent. When I renewed my driver’s license last year, I made sure to do it while I was home for Christmas, theorizing that I’d be back soon and wouldn’t want to deal with taking the test all over again.