As one season segues into the next...
The major self-assigned task for the day is the Great Taking-Down of The Tree. Which necessarily encompasses the Lesser Winding of the Lights, and the Repacking of the Ornaments, the Clipping of the Branches for Mulch for the Alleged Benefit of the Hydrangeas, and the Lugging of the Stripped Trunk Out to the Curb Where the City Is Supposed to Pick It Up But Never Does. The Return of the Tree Accessories to the Attic, to a Place Where They'll Be Easier to Find Next Year. And, finally, the First High Vacuuming of the Sun Room, to Pick Up More Needles Than the Tree Had When We Originally Brought It In.
Then I usually sit for a while.
Banal, obvious, mentally unstimulating and somehow sad as this annual process is, there is always one moment of expectant tension and inevitable disappointment -- that brief interval when the tree trunk comes out of the (usually dry by now ) holder, and I quickly check it for... roots.
There's probably a simple explanation for my fascination with, and yearning for roots, and plant-like things that produce them -- especially when these roots are produced unexpectedly. Maybe it has to do with my itinerant childhood, and the way I carried that pattern forth into my adult life, because the habit of packing and relocating seemed so ingrained. Maybe these surprise rootlets represent a resounding rebuttal of the inevitability of death -- much the way I experience the emergence of hostas every spring, in the little bed I created outside the basement window along the driveway. How jealous I am, every March or so, when those dark purple tips poke up through the unprepossessing soil; I know I will never manage so simple a leafy resurrection.
But the Christmas tree? I mean, it's so stupid to hope, but I persist.
And after all, every once in a while, there is an unexpected revival, right there in the sunroom as a matter of fact. Last year's crop of poinsettias, which all came to what I was sure was the brink of death because of my indifference to providing them with water, had then quietly passed beyond the point of no return a few weeks ago -- or so I thought. Imagine my surprise and delight when, because I pushed some date seeds into an empty pot of soil, and wanted to coax them to what would surely, under my care, be a brief life, I filled the littler plastic watering can, and was splashing about, and I noticed -- there were leaves on the once-dead poinsettia! And not only leaves -- but bright, bright red ones! Red as blood, appropriately enough! Teeny, almost gem-like red leaves! I decided to water the plant. It clearly deserves it.
I've also got a sprig of camellia in an old, repurposed glass ink well, on the kitchen window sill. The leaves are green, even though the twig has been sitting there for almost a month now. I keep checking the end of the little brown branch, hoping to see tendrils forming. Not that I would know what to do with it, if it were to achieve this entry-level bid for continued existence. I'm not a gardener so much as a kind of vegetable Frankenstein, wanting things to grow, no matter where I put them or why. If I had the resources, I would probably be hip-deep in weird and offensive hybrids, coaxed into embarrassed existence through deft grafting and the artful application of waxes and strings...
But, for today, the Christmas tree will be completely and utterly dead, and I'll dismember it, and spread the cut branches around the base of the hydrangea bushes, starting with the ones closest to the front door, and working back toward the garage, and the rock pile that was supposed to become a romantic seating area until I discovered that it's a hotbed of mosquito activity every summer. So we have hydrangeas there, and foxglove, and one big enthusiastic fern, like the loud drunk at every party. And after the indoor, sunroom tree corner has been returned to something like normality, I'll settle a wicker chair back into its place, and it will be as though nothing had ever happened. And we'll settle into the long dry celebration-free period of Winter, until Valentine's Day does its best to get our pulses going just a bit stronger, which will happen mostly through the agency of the chocolate.
Maybe, by this coming Christmas, my new phone (I'll certainly have to get one by then) will have a holographic Christmas Tree app, and I can just project, into the usual corner, an image of something full and balanced and lovely and sparkling and magical, and then switch it back to 'Incoming Messages Only' on January 10th. While the vacuum cleaner heaves a huge sigh of relief. And up in the attic, those old glass decorations, nestled in their flimsy egg-crate boxes, and with the shiny reflective layers of gold and magenta flaking off their insides, can have a long, long rest.
Maybe, when next I see them, they'll have put out roots?
© 2013 Walter Zimmerman
No comments:
Post a Comment