How to dispose of a Christmas tree

…a swell memory

Photo by Frank Eiffert on Unsplash

Oh, hello there. It’s been about 95 years since I last posted here. I have been lazy, distracted. Caught up in what feels like a spiderweb of indecision. I keep saying I don’t want to be in the winter anymore and yet here I am in the winter. I wonder why. I do have options. I am lucky to have options! But I am not moving fast enough to suit myself. Meanwhile, the days hang heavy and gray, and the brown leaves that are left on the trees seem to shiver in the wind.

Today I decided to stop my moaning and groaning and to try to embrace the season. I made some whole wheat bread that is now rising in a clear bowl and I hope it doesn’t make me seem like a small person to say it lifted my heart significantly . I thought about how when you take a brisk walk in the cold and you come back in the house, it feels wonderful. I thought about hot chocolate and marshmallows. I thought about flannel sheets And whimsically decorated mittens. I thought about all the different kinds of snow that there are, from furious, tiny flakes, seeming to chase each other around, to slowly falling large flakes that look like somebody high up above is cutting up lace and tossing it down. And then I had a really great winter memory come to revisit.

When I was 19 years old, I had a roommate named Lois, and our policy for how to live our lives was to, as much as possible, do precisely what we wanted whenever and wherever we wanted, no matter what occurred to us. One time, after Christmas had just passed, I had an idea for disposing of our tacky little tree, and all its ornaments, too. It seemed to me that a tree that had served such a noble purpose deserved a noble burial, namely, a Viking funeral, or at least my idea of what a Viking funeral for a Christmas tree might be. It was late at night when I conceived this idea and Lois and I were in our nightgowns. But we put on our cowgirl boots and our winter coats over our robes, and we took the Christmas tree and marched with it down to the edge of the Mississippi river, which was not terribly far from where we lived, and commenced the ceremony