The day after Christmas, Brian and I went to the Midland Mall to look around for some late presents for his siblings. We wandered around in the crowds without much luck, and ended up at Target, where I bought a new bath mat for back home, since the other one had come apart in the washing machine. After escaping from Tar-jay, we bought coffee drinkies at Barnes and Noble, and finally back outside to the sunny, snowy parking lot.

Brian drove us around Midland in his mom’s Blazer. The roads had all been plowed and the remaining skin of slush had melted away. We went to what I suppose was meant to be “old town,” or a part of the town that had once been more meaningful or more centered, but had long ago been deserted for the mall and the WalMart [Note: I have taken a vow never to set foot in a WalMart or give them a cent of my money. So far, so good].

So the old town wasn’t totally dead or anything, it was just irrelevant. Chintzy boutiques and gift shops and candy stores and so on. But it stood out because it was a place where people could actually walk around from shop to shop, instead of driving from one strip mall to the next.

We continued on toward the river. In Midland, two rivers collide to become one, and over this point there is a three-legged bridge. A “tridge,” if you will. Brian parked the car and we walked through the snowdrifts and up the path toward one leg of the tridge.

The snow was all tamped down by many prints. In the center of the triptych there are three benches. We stood by the railing together, looking upstream at the slow-moving water, which carried huge plates of thin ice into the main artery. We threw snowballs at the ice sheets to see if they would break. Brian once floated on this river, on an iceberg — on a much colder day.

We walked down another leg of the structure to a big field of snow adjacent to a golf course. Having a sled right then would have been nice. We saw some animal tracks and followed them a short ways into the brush, and figured they were probably a dog’s.

I wished we could have walked for longer, taken a long hike, but we had to get back to the house, and my boots would have soon become wet. So we walked back over the three-pronged bridge, looking down again at the glassy river and kicking snow into the water like kids. The snow around the park was still largely untouched. The trees were still wrapped in their soft, creamy mantles. And the clouds were swept away, making the snow blindingly white. This was one of my favorite memories from Christmas this year.