The year of the blue tree, part 5

In which the blue forest invades a cottage in the Village of Templeton...

6:58 p.m. N is asleep, and R falls asleep immediately upon arrival. At home, we discover that the tree is about sixteen inches too tall for the 9' 6"ceiling. Mike measures the ceiling with a 9' 6" fishing pole. We knew the tree was too tall, but we didn't know how high the ceiling was. There! that's settled. We can't cut off the bottom, because it now appears that the spruce is actually three fused trees, and the base is meant to be hold them together. Briefly I remember the perfect ten-dollar tree of last year, a lovely thing that was immaculate in form and just tickled the ceiling. We heave and wrestle and turn this multiplying tree in our enormous cast-iron Victorian bucket stand. We chop the top--the many tops--and I stuff the leftovers into a big galvanized bucket. There, they look like a small tree, a civilized and easy tree. Our spruce looks utterly wild, untamed, a whole forest of trees crammed into an 1808 parlor. We discover three of last summer's nests. They belong neither to hummingbirds nor wrens but are generous habitations, streaming with the raveled grass from the hummocks. Tips of a possibly infinite number of trees swim on the ceiling, bent slightly.

It will look astonishing, I say.

Mike wants to cut more at the top so that we can use our Polish glass finial. It will be all stubs, if we start trimming, I point out. Maybe we should just hide the finial somewhere in the tree, somewhere surprising. It may be that everything about this tree is supposed to be surprising, beginning with the fact that it made it over hill, dale, hummock, etc.

Well! That is enough for one day.

I'm awfully glad that I have a no-never-work rule for Sunday, or I might have mistaken the day for hard labor instead of a mere dawdling afternoon of Christmas tree cutting. Everyone who is awake is ravenous, and the others will be likewise, when we wake them. After dinner, we can light candles in the living room and admire our personal forest. Who knows what might happen next, with this huge wild green place asserting itself in the room? Funny, now that it's in the lamplight the tree doesn't even look blue.

Finis

That was a day in Advent 2001: the fifteenth of December. Life has gone flooding on, over the dam of sticks and through the magical woods. N is no longer toddling about in a tall cap, and B and R are now teenagers, shedding strands of the cocoon of childhood, holding a dying man close, encountering their first major death--looking forward and looking back. Life and death skip hand and hand through the blue forest. I go on being a writer and a mother, living two lives, watching out for wolves in the undergrowth and falling stars above the canopy. Other nigh-perfect trees have come and gone, but a blue branch still stirs the imagination.

Today is a Snow Day, no school, no karate, no cars passing in the street. It's windless, so the flakes are falling straight down and the firs are keeping their snow. The sketchy plum trees and the gazebo with its ravel of Dutchman's pipe vines go foreign and lovely.