Today's Daily Double is... luminaries!

Two days from Christmas and my brain has slipped off home to Cary, North Carolina.

Christmas in Cary meant praying for snow and getting 52 degrees and drizzle, flat white light coming down through the loblolly pines. What we got instead of snow was luminaries. Whole neighborhoods would line their streets with paper bags, a scoop of sand and one candle in each, hundreds of little lights running the cul-de-sacs into the dark, and you'd drive through slow with the windows cracked and carols on the radio. Better than snow. I just didn't know it yet.

Christmas morning meant a new bike, or the memory of the year of the new bike, which glowed hard enough to color all the years around it. Loops in the cul-de-sac in a coat I did not need, red clay, pine straw, some neighbor's smoker already going at nine in the morning. Ham, sweet tea brewed thick as syrup, pecan pie, a fire in the fireplace purely for ceremony.

I left, got a geology degree, worked in parks, moved west, and stacked up a whole different life on a whole different ocean. I would pick it again every time. But homesickness doesn't want the whole thing back, it just wants one slow lap around the old neighborhood with the windows down.

Tomorrow, Christmas Eve in Miami.