December 15, 2021
Thanks to the past weekend
having been spent with three of our four great-grandchildren here for a
sleepover, our Christmas tree is up and decorated.
It’s not a real tree that you’ll
find here in our house. Our daughter developed an allergy to the real thing
when she was a young teen. (She can’t even have one of those classic pine-tree
air fresheners in her car.) The tree we have now we purchased a few years back,
the December following the “great attic clean-up caper” that David and the
girls staged one spring. This was back before our daughter moved in with us. It
was a very well-organized effort, needed because over the last many years prior
to that noble effort, they both—our girls, that is—liked to bring things here
to “store”. That’s all well and good and we are always happy to help them—until
the space runs out. So, they planned a mass clean-out of what was no longer
needed/wanted. We’d ordered a huge bin,
and the three of them, working together, did a good job “cleaning up” the
attic. The good news is, that there was a lot of space created and unwanted stuff
gotten rid of.
Unfortunately, they tossed our
Christmas tree out in error. Our daughter had mistaken our tree for her tree, which
she had thought she had stored here. And during that great attic clean up she had
decided, for whatever reason, that she no longer wanted it. There were a couple
of other items in that clean up that we lost as well, including a small metal
table that I had purchased to use when I needed to sort out my paperwork during
tax prep season. The table had been bought the fall before, and it hadn’t cost
much, but it had worked perfectly.
The tree we have now isn’t
very tall—only about five foot high. Because I like that tree, the year after
we acquired it I went out and purchased some miniature-sized decorations for
it. We have lights, garland, and hanging ornaments. With small dogs in the house,
we don’t bother with the tinsel or anything else that might end up going
through a dog’s digestive track. The tree is pretty, and the little ones did a
good job of hanging the tiny ornaments.
The snow that I wrote about a
couple of weeks back melted, and then we got more snow. It, too, melted over this
last weekend. On Monday, as I peeked around the corners of my computer monitor
to see outside, I was greeted by bright sunshine, bare trees, and green lawns, mostly
raked of leaves. I was blessed to see the exact same sight again yesterday, as
well. I don’t know if this is real, or just perception, but it seems to me that
two straight days of sunshine and blue skies lately is a rarity. I tend to think its more the former than the
latter, since we’re at the time of year when two lines have been added to the
daily forecast screen at the weather network web site: expected snowfall and expected
hours of sunshine. It looked so pretty outside Monday and yesterday. If it
weren’t for the fact that it was only just a couple of degrees above the freezing
mark, I might have been tempted to go and sit on the porch for a bit. The
forecast for today tells me to expect 0 hours of sunshine, and possibly some
rain. Since the skies are now grey and the street is wet, I’d say that’s an
accurate report.
Because our local government
will not collect yard waste again until the spring, one is left trying to
decide what’s best: letting the leaves that are still there on the lawn right now
stay there, to be covered by the snow that is sure to come again any day now; or
does one rake, and bag, and then store those full bags of leaves in the outside
storage spaces until spring?
Friends, that is a dilemma
with which my beloved husband has been wrestling over the last couple of weeks.
Or one that he says he is wrestling with. I think the truth is, he just doesn’t
want to take the chance that any stored bags will somehow get wet, thus beginning
their decomposition cycle. So, he really is counting on the snow to arrive soon
and hide the unsightly brown, somewhat rotting former foliage from view.
My daughter is going to take
me Christmas shopping in the coming week, so I can get something for the
smallest two of our great-grandchildren. At two-and-a-half and
three-and-a-half, they much prefer getting something to open on Christmas
morning, and who can blame them for that?
The older two of our great-grandchildren
look forward to shopping trips with their “nanny” where they can choose their
own gifts. And, of course, there’s the plus for them that the after-Christmas
sales mean they can get far more than they otherwise would have with the money
gifted. And yes, at the age of eight, the oldest of the two can reason that
out.
I know it’s lazy on our part,
but we pretty much gift money to the rest of our family—kids and grandkids
alike. It is lazy, but it is also the gift that always fits and never has to be
returned due to a flaw in the manufacturing. That makes it a win-win for two
older people who really don’t like shopping.
Love,
Morgan
http://www.bookstrand.com/morgan-ashbury
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