It is made of wicker, rather unraveled, and the wheels wobble like a drunkard’s legs. The buggy is mine that is, it was bought for me when I was born. Together, we guide our buggy, a dilapidated baby carriage, out to the garden and into a grove of pecan trees. The hat is found, a straw cartwheel corsaged with velvet roses out-of-doors has faded: it once belonged to a more fashionable relative. It’s always the same: a morning arrives in November, and my friend, as though officially inaugurating the Christmas time of year that exhilarates her imagination and fuels the blaze of her heart, announces: “It’s fruitcake weather! Fetch our buggy. Oh, Buddy, stop stuffing biscuit and fetch our buggy. And there were no birds singing they’ve gone to warmer country, yes indeed. “The courthouse bell sounded so cold and clear. “I knew it before I got out of bed,” she says, turning away from the window with a purposeful excitement in her eyes. The other Buddy died in the 1880’s, when she was still a child. She calls me Buddy, in memory of a boy who was formerly her best friend. Other people inhabit the house, relatives and though they have power over us, and frequently make us cry, we are not, on the whole, too much aware of them. I am seven she is sixty-something, We are cousins, very distant ones, and we have lived together-well, as long as I can remember. The person to whom she is speaking is myself. “Oh my,” she exclaims, her breath smoking the windowpane, “it’s fruitcake weather!” Her face is remarkable-not unlike Lincoln’s, craggy like that, and tinted by sun and wind but it is delicate too, finely boned, and her eyes are sherry-colored and timid.

She is small and sprightly, like a bantam hen but, due to a long youthful illness, her shoulders are pitifully hunched.

She is wearing tennis shoes and a shapeless gray sweater over a summery calico dress. Just today the fireplace commenced its seasonal roar.Ī woman with shorn white hair is standing at the kitchen window. A great black stove is its main feature but there is also a big round table and a fireplace with two rocking chairs placed in front of it. Consider the kitchen of a spreading old house in a country town. A coming of winter morning more than twenty years ago. A Christmas Memory ~ A Classic American Short Story

A christmas story truman capote