Winter Tree

It’s February, and we just took down our Christmas tree. I’d begun to feel sheepish about it’s lengthy tenure, but every evening, when early night shuttered the world beyond our windows, we’d turn on the tree lights, and their glow banished the season’s bleak darkness. 

“We should take it down,” I started saying in mid-January. 

“Not yet,” Dave would say as he looked gratefully toward the tree beaming in the corner. “I’m not ready.”

I wasn’t either, but somehow it felt slovenly to hold onto Christmas for so long. 

We were late, for us, in getting it up in the first place.  A storm had encased twigs and branches in ice and we’d hoped for a thaw before heading to Maple Row Farm to choose and cut a tree.  This was the one week of winter that held the cold, however, so our boots crunched over frozen grasses, and light glanced off brittle ice trees by the time we walked into the farm fields. 

We thought the cold would limit our usual meandering hunt, that we’d be willing to settle for the gaps between branches or lack of aroma that usually eliminate contenders. But no. We trudged up the hills, to the edges of the rows, stopping to mull over each other’s finds, diplomatically taking a pass, and continuing on.

Finally, the tree was selected and lugged, heavy with the weight of its icy coat, to the side of the trail for pick-up by a tractor.  When eventually we loaded it onto our car, the farm hand who helped us said, “be sure it thaws before you bring it into the house, otherwise the warm air will shock it and it’ll drop its needles.”

A fortuitous caution: we hadn’t thought of that.  This meant an added delay in putting it up, so we were entitled to enjoy it for all those extra weeks. Plus, our 14-months-old granddaughter, Eleanor, loved it. Whenever she came to visit, she immediately looked to the corner, pointed at the tree, and if the lights weren’t on, pointed at the switch. Then we would stand, the baby in my arms or Dave’s, our faces bright against the green pine, as she reached for her favorite ornaments.

I’d unhook each one from its branch, and Eleanor would stroke the fur of the tiny fuzzy fox, marvel at the sparkles on the delicate glass balls, and clamor to hold felt angels and Santas. She never seemed to develop the affection that Dave and I have for the cardboard toilet-paper-roll angel that Tucker made in 1985 that graces the treetop every year, but she was fascinated, of course, by the fragile glass icicles and longed to clutch them. 

I wonder what she’ll think when she arrives on Saturday and the tree, by now a familiar fixture, is gone.

Last week, our daughter-in-law, Lisa, called from Boston with little Paul and Lexi to FaceTime. We showed the kids the tree, and I said, “You know, it’s not really a Christmas tree anymore; it’s a Winter Tree.” Paul remembers everything, and I know the name will resurface when next year’s tree stands firm in that corner in February.  

The tree stopped taking water about two weeks ago.  We’d add a little periodically, just in case it was thirsty, but we’ve made the mistake in the past of keeping the tray filled and dealing with a mess when the time came to cart the tree out. This year, the mess wasn’t about water, but pine needles. For the past few days, without any hint of air currents or someone brushing by, the tree would release a shower of needles, their descent an audible pffffttttt as they flowed through their brethren to the quilt encircling the base. This morning, a number of branches were totally bare, and the needles on the floor were inches deep. I could have started a business making those little pine souvenir pillows they sell in Vermont gift stores.   

As Dave and I gingerly plucked off ornaments and unstrung the lights, more needles, the tenacious survivors, sprinkled on our shoulders and sleeves. Long gone as it was, still the tree treated me to a waft of balsam-sweet scent as I gripped the trunk and lifted it when Dave freed it from the metal stand.

We maneuvered it past the piano and out the door to the screened porch and then the yard, leaving a green scattered path all the way. As I do every year, I was a little teary as I said good-bye and whispered, “Thank you. You were beautiful.”     

Dave's Bread

Every few weeks, Dave gets out an enormous antique white porcelain bowl. He scoops in grits, corn meal, oatmeal, and teff, then pours in boiling potato water.  He doesn’t measure anything. He lets this brown watery soup sit for a while, then adds warmed honey, heated beer, milk, yeast, and a mix of flours. Finally he blends them, stirring laboriously with a large wooden spoon. The batter is then left to rise, occasionally puffing over the sides of the bowl onto the counter. 

Dave has always enjoyed making bread, but it became a loving, healing compulsion when I started chemo ten years ago. 

On matters of diet, my oncologist was firm: no whites. No white flour, no white rice, no white sugar, no white potatoes. I live on bread and pasta, and mashed potatoes are my absolute favorite, so this was grim news. Chemo steals appetite and perverts taste, so finding foods I could eat, much less enjoy, was going to be a challenge. Dave, my dearest Dave, pursued that challenge at every meal.   

I loved the English muffin bread Dave baked periodically, but white flour was the primary ingredient, so he upended the recipe, substituting oatmeal, quinoa, amaranth, and rye flours for that forbidden white.  The combinations varied with every baking, as did the addition of corn meal, beer, honey or molasses. Always, the kitchen filled with an aroma that conveyed health, caring, and coziness. The result was darker than the original, made to be toasted, tasty on its own, and delicious with butter, jam, or honey.  (I know, you’re reading this and dying for a slice right now.)  

Ever since, we’ve begun each day with coffee and two slices of toast. Also since then, friends have gotten frightening diagnoses or lost loved ones.  What does one do in the face of illness, fear, and sorrow? 

Dave bakes, and gives bread. As a result, his batches have increased, as has the frequency of baking. He loves the robust mixing and miraculous rise, and we both love the comfort of an oven radiating warmth and heavenly smells, as well as the thought of the pleasure those loaves might bring. 

Love is always life’s most necessary ingredient, now more than ever it seems. A piece or two of Dave’s hot, buttered toast is like adding a heart and body-sustaining hug. 

What Future for Them?

When we call our son for a phone visit, he and 4-year-old Paul are watching “Cars 2.” 

“Can you say ‘hi’ to Lealea and Tato?’” asks Tucker.

A dear little voice complies with a greeting, but, when Tucker suggests pausing the video to talk to us, not surprisingly, Paul declines.  My son, however, is willing to miss out on the action; the movie is one of Paul’s favorites, so it’s had plenty of screen time.

While we chat, in the background, Paul says something about Lightning McQueen, the snappy red racecar hero of the movie. I can picture my son snuggled up with his boy on the soft gray sofa in their living room, Lightning large on the TV before them. I want their lives to remain healthy, safe, and happy, as comfortable and normal as this afternoon on the couch. 

But to me right now, normalcy seems suspended.  

The impeachment hearings have not haunted my kids and their spouses, any more than Reagan’s Iran-Contra affair haunted me when Tucker and Casey were little. As I was then, my kids are worried about their little one’s colds, Eleanor’s double ear infection, Paul’s happiness at school, Lexi’s propensity (and astonishing ability) for destroying the sturdy board books that survived Paul’s babyhood.  Just keeping their toddlers safe at this age is a challenge. And at the end of a work day, getting the kids fed and to bed leaves little energy to rail at Mitch McConnell’s collaboration with the White House, the GOP Senators’ betrayal of their oaths to the Constitution and before God, and the strategic distractions of the defense team lawyers.

So I agonize on their behalf.  What will reverse the heightened crumbling of democracy, social justice, tolerance, alliances, and the planet’s systems under this administration? 

My incomprehension and anguish are entwined. Many of the GOP Senators who voted to acquit the president were born within a decade on either side of me. They experienced the sixties and seventies too, the revulsion to war, the surge in social movements and environmentalism, the reverence for this miraculous planet and its workings. We understood that stewardship, not dominion, was our role. As I did, these senators must have worn tie-dye and bell bottoms and sung ‘”The Age of Aquarius,” with its yearning for “harmony and understanding, sympathy and trust abounding.” 

What became of that idealism and the hopeful future it promised to shape? 

When the hearings began, I knew, as everyone else did, that Trump would be acquitted.  This was not a surprise. So, why am I so furious and unnerved? 

 - Because I listened to Chaplain Barry Black open the fourth day of Senate hearings with the prayer, “Eternal Lord God, You have summarized ethical behavior in a single sentence, ‘Do for others what you would like them to do for you.’ Remind our Senators that they alone are accountable to you for their conduct. Lord, help them remember that they can’t ignore you and get away with it, for we always reap what we sow.”

 - Because I heard Adam Schiff quote Alexander Hamilton in describing the rogue president the impeachment clause was designed to guard against:

 “When a man unprincipled in private life[,] desperate in his fortune, bold in his temper . . . despotic in his ordinary demeanour — known to have scoffed in private at the principles of liberty — when such a man is seen to mount the hobby horse of popularity — to join in the cry of danger to liberty — to take every opportunity of embarrassing the General Government & bringing it under suspicion — to flatter and fall in with all the non sense of the zealots of the day — It may justly be suspected that his object is to throw things into confusion that he may 'ride the storm and direct the whirlwind.'"

 - Because, having watched much of the House hearings and testimony, I heard the House Managers provide credible evidence of Trump’s abuse of power and obstruction of Congress. 

 - Because I heard the House Managers outline the repercussions of acquittal as this president perceives himself vindicated, and, freed of the threat of impeachment, is emboldened, unfettered by honor, facts, or moral behavior. 

 - Because I read Republican Lamar Alexander’s statement, “There is no need for more evidence to prove something that has already been proven,” and yet conclude that compromising national security by pressuring a foreign power to influence an election and obstructing a Congressional investigation were merely “inappropriate.”

Is it possible the Republican Senators were unmoved by all that, or didn’t believe it? I don’t think so, and that’s what sickens me. At our peril and that of democracy, they chose their ambitions and loyalty to Trump over country.

So, I worry for Paul, Lexi, and Eleanor.  For Hazel, Miles, and Charlie.  For Ava, Taylor, and Mariela. For Lily, Maddie, and Mia. I pray that in casting a vote in November, Republicans and Democrats alike consider, not just their own present, but the future their little ones will inherit.