Christmas

Christmas in Maine becomes a turning point in Helen’s grieving year: the holiday brings a deep hush, places a fierce hawk hunt in the middle of ordinary domestic life, and helps her recognize both the possibility of making a home and the care her friends have given her. Its movement from snowy river to suburban backyard, beach, and Cambridge unsettles the boundary she had drawn between wildness and human community.

A quiet Christmas by the river

On Christmas Eve, Helen sits at a window overlooking an icy tidal river on the coast of southern Maine. Snow makes the landscape white and Prussian blue; wintering ducks move across it, and a loon slides seaward. After pancakes and maple bacon, she feels quieter than at any time since her father died. Her mother sleeps in the next room, her brother is with his in-laws, and Mabel is three thousand miles away, staying with Stuart and Mandy.

Helen and her mother are spending Christmas in America as guests of Erin and his parents, Harriet and Jim, who run a bed-and-breakfast. Helen first met Erin years earlier, when she was working with breeding falcons in Wales. A young surfer and falconer, he had come to Britain hoping to fly falcons but found himself jetwashing aviaries in driving rain. The two became, in Helen’s understanding, the kind of close friends one makes only rarely. Erin’s circle in Maine differs from her Cambridge friends: its members include fishermen, hunters, artisans, teachers, innkeepers, and guides, people whose work includes making furniture and ceramic pots, teaching, and fishing for lobster and striped bass.

A hawk in the backyards

The holiday’s encounter with wildness comes not in a remote landscape but among snowy suburban backyards. A hawk twists after a squirrel, strikes it in mid-leap, and falls with it through the snow. When Helen arrives, the squirrel is dead and the hawk mantles over its prey, wings spread. Blood marks the snow; the hawk’s feet and feathers carry a paste of snow and blood. Around the hunt are garages, a low fence, a snow-covered barbecue, an inflatable Santa on an inflatable Harley Davidson, and Christmas lights. The scene holds violence and familiarity together: the hawk has made a kill in the midst of home and community.

The setting overturns Helen’s expectation that wildness belongs somewhere else. The hunt is the wildest she has seen, yet it takes place in a town’s backyards, among signs of ordinary life. Looking back from the river, she wonders whether home can be anywhere, and recognizes that a hawk may find a children’s play-frame more useful as a lookout than a pine in a remote place. Maine has given her a family for Christmas and shown her that the hawk, too, can belong within that circle. The holiday’s discovery is not that wildness has been tamed, but that it can be reconciled with home.

The working world and the tourist’s distance

On the group’s last morning, Helen, Erin, and her mother walk along Parsons Beach in bitter wind, over frozen sand. Offshore, seaducks fly in ragged lines. The water below them supports Maine’s lobster industry, visible in signs for lobster rolls and in Erin’s family history: his father had once been a lobsterman. Helen remembers going out with the family on their boat. While they hauled, measured, sorted, and banded lobsters, rebaited traps, and set them again, she watched without being able to help. Their pleasure at having her along did not dispel her discomfort at being an English visitor out of her depth.

The memory sharpens a question about her own life with Mabel. Helen had spent months on the hill, watching the harvest, tractors harrowing slopes, and stockmen turning sheep out to winter, without speaking to anyone. She had not intended her time with the hawk to resemble tourism, but recognizes that she had avoided becoming part of the working world. She connects that distance to the summer visitors who photograph lobster boats and stacks of traps: close enough to look, but not necessarily involved in the lives and labor that make a place.

Ritual, return, and gratitude

A tree burns down to a damp skeleton in the snow. Helen experiences the fire as a ritual burn, a ceremony of strange, protective magic; she and Erin laugh on the walk back to the house. The holiday then turns toward departure and return. Helen and her mother fly back to London, where Helen drives her mother home, promises to visit soon, and continues to Cambridge to see Stuart and Mandy and Mabel.

Mabel is in the garden, fat and happy among a crowd of pointers. Stuart explains that flu has kept him in bed through Christmas and that he has only been able to throw Mabel her food. His account makes Helen see how much her friends have done for her and how readily she had taken their help and affection for granted. She thanks them not only for caring for the hawk but for the love behind that care, and hugs Stuart despite his warning not to catch his illness. Christmas thus closes not with a retreat from human ties but with their recognition: the wild can be brought home, and home also depends on other people’s unshowy acts of care.