“Over the river and through the wood to grandmother’s house we go…”
In some other timeline and universe my younger self rides the winding roads to Hoosick Falls to pick up my grandmother, as my Mom leads my brother and me in this holiday chestnut.
“The horse knows the way to carry the sleigh through the white and drifted snow…”
Sitting beside my brother in the backseat of the station wagon, we are feeling all sorts of Thanksgiving anticipation – and filled with gleeful excitement at having Gram join us for a few days. When you’re a kid, those few days feel like a blessed eternity.
For a number of formative years, ‘The Wizard of Oz’ would be broadcast around this pre-holiday time – a comfort and enthralling thrill at once.
“Over the river and through the woods, oh how the wind does blow…”
How precarious our journeys of childhood were – and how lucky we were to not have any real realization of this. Blithely and blissfully unaware of the dangers along the way to grandmother’s house, and the imagined fears of flying monkeys on the television, we felt only the giddy happiness of the season – the promise of Christmas around the corner.
Revisiting these winding roads recently, the beauty felt muted, the strains of comfort felt distant, and the trees looked barren. We fill in so much of what we want to remember that the actual scenes of childhood are always emptier when we try to revisit them. The mind plays with memory to help us heal, sometimes.
The song repeats itself – over the river and over again – and it’s so short it bears the repetition until it becomes meaningless, until even the melody is lost and doesn’t matter anymore.
