The Gift of the (Aunt) Mary

When The Boy's Aunt Mary met him for the first time, she gave him a lovely blanket she had knit, adorned with stripes of orange and tan and green, just the right size for a baby boy. "His cousin says it's so bright it'll wake him up," she laughed, but The Boy slept quite cozily beneath it.

He was six weeks old then, and by six months, the blanket had become a staple of our lives. If it was a tad chilly during our morning walk on the beach, I tucked the blanket around him in the stroller; his chin shone baby-skin white against it and he looked warm and safe. If he fell asleep in his car seat while Hubby and I grabbed a quiet lunch out, he snoozed beneath it, the stripes wrapping him securely. We went nowhere without Aunt Mary's blanket.

When The Boy and I flew to our new home in Asheville, Aunt Mary's blanket was peeking out of his overstuffed diaper bag. When we explored our new neighborhood, it lay in the basket under the stroller. The Boy grew, and Aunt Mary's blanket settled into lap rug status, still perfect to keep him warm on mountain fall mornings in his miniature fisherman's sweater and wool stocking cap with the football stitched on the brim.

And then Aunt Mary's blanket disappeared.

"Have you seen Aunt Mary's blanket?" I asked Hubby one morning. I was slightly crazed, as I often am when we are trying to leave the house on a cold morning. A few minutes ticks into several minutes, which inevitably become fifteen or twenty as I corral and layer a crawling boy, put on and remove my own gloves ten or twelve times to snap snaps and guide small thumbs inside tiny mittens and pull socks up and pants legs down.

"Nope," Hubby answered. He doesn't sweat going outside in cold weather the way I do. As long as The Boy is wearing a hat, Hubby figures he'll stay reasonably warm.

"He needs something over his legs," I moaned. Although the days here tend to reach bearable temperatures, the mornings can be bitter. Our morning walks to the park, where Hubby throws a tennis ball for the girls and The Boy and I huddle together pretending to enjoy the spectacle, were often nothing more than stubbornness on my part. "I can survive another real winter. I think I can, I think I can . . ."

"The blanket my cousin made him will be fine," Hubby said. His voice carried a note of decisiveness with which I vehemently disagreed.

I became even more certain that The Boy could not do without Aunt Mary's blanket when Hubby returned downstairs with the replacement blanket. It was flannel, not knit. It was a serene green, not bright slashes of color. It was bigger than lap rug size. It would not do at all.

Still, I said nothing. Sometimes it is best to let your partner do some parenting, even if he's wrong.

You'd think the sight of The Boy awkwardly wrapped in a green flannel blanket would have inspired me to find Aunt Mary's blanket, but it didn't. Apparently I was too busy searching for my own lost life.

And so the weeks passed. An unseasonably warm spell was met with relief, as The Boy could be strolled to school blanket-less. Cold days became an occasion for unearthing the sweet collection of blankets in which we used to swaddle The Boy, back in the days when he could be swaddled and leaving the house was not cause for fear of frostbite. And still, Aunt Mary's blanket remained mysteriously absent.

Hubby and I wondered again about it this weekend.

We had taken a drive to Maggie Valley as The Boy napped in the back seat. Maggie Valley, it turned out, had little to offer a family out for a Sunday excursion. If we had been looking to rent a room in a motor hotel where we could sit in a hot tub next to a running stream, we were in the right place, at least according to the hopeful advertisements outside a surprising number of motels adorning the main road. The stream, apparently, dipped and turned to accommodate the maximum number of hot tubs.

Alas, we were looking for nothing more than a cozy meal and perhaps the chance to purchase those last few holiday gifts. Maggie Valley offered nothing to meet these needs.

Eager to extend The Boy's nap, we kept driving, out of Maggie Valley, down the road to the ski slopes and the Cherokee casino.

I noted with some vague interest the snow dusting the sides of the road. Mostly, I was glad it was here, and not on the side of my road at home.

Then I looked through the windshield and saw the same fine white dust dashing horizontally across my line of vision. My line of vision isn't the best -- the only way I can tell it's raining short of getting wet is to examine puddles for ripples of raindrops because I am absolutely incapable of seeing precipitation falling from the sky -- so I figured if I could see the snow there was more than a little bit of it.

The car slid on the icy road.

"It says 'last exit before Parkway,'" I said hopefully as I pointed at a sign on the side of the road.

"Do you want to try the Parkway?" Hubby asked.

Hmm. Higher elevation, windier, narrower road. The Parkway did not seem the wisest solution.

"It's kind of windy," I allowed.

Hubby must have found the weather conditions more than a little worrisome, because he turned the car around and drove back through Maggie Valley instead of wending his way through new, no more interesting but at least undiscovered, towns.

We stopped for lunch in Waynesville, which we had visited before, but which we knew would at least offer food and warmth. And as we wandered Main Street after lunch, we wrapped our arms around The Boy to keep him warm because we lacked Aunt Mary's blanket.

We came home in the afternoon with one more short outing on our list -- a visit to the music store around the corner from our house where we hoped to find a gift for our musically inclined nephew.

Hubby grabbed The Boy and I grabbed myself. We dashed through a cutting wind to the store, quickly discovered nothing there, and walked back in a lull between gusts of wind.

Hubby let out a gasp.

There on the sidewalk, covered in leaves and the dampness of more than one rainfall, was Aunt Mary's blanket.

"Maybe I dropped it on the way to the bagel shop one morning," Hubby laughed.

"I'll bet it fell out of the stroller when we walked to Greenlife," I said, certain now that I remembered exactly when it had happened.

Aunt Mary's blanket is washed now and almost dry and ready to use.

But why the Gift of the Magi reference? What made me immediately think of that story when I first saw the blanket, its fall colors poking out of the faded fall leaves? What, in short, is the irony in the return of Aunt Mary's gift? (What makes the hair combs useless because the wife has cut her hair to buy a chain for the watch her husband sold to buy her the combs? for those of you a bit vague in the classic literature department.)

Well, I thought hopefully, maybe the irony is that although we found Aunt Mary's blanket there will be no more need for it because the winter will continue to be uncharacteristically warm and I will make it to spring without ever once having to wear the Timberland boots I bought in college for the deep, cold Providence snowfalls.

To the contrary, the irony, it turns out, is that -- far from my fantasy of endless warm days being fulfilled -- a light snow fell that night, dusting the ground of our front yard. It looked just like the dusting of snow on the road outside Maggie Valley.