The tree looks very nice, a proper Christmas tree, except the LED lights are really much, much too bright for it. They are small but violent. Old-fashioned frosted lights, too big for this tree, would suit it better, with their soft, diffuse glow which you could hide among the branches. And some of the colors of the LEDs are terrible; a screaming magenta is the worst. What has magenta to do with Christmas, or anything else? I’d take off all the magentas and airport-landing-strip blues and have it green red and gold, if I could, but the strings come with five colors, and they don’t seem to sell replacement lights, you have to buy a whole new string, which will, of course, have the same five colors. I made little tubes of tissue paper and slipped them over the small, fiercely glaring bulbs, but it didn’t make much difference, and it looked kind of crummy. All the same I left them on.
So Christmas came, and the tree shone each day and each night until I unplugged it before going to bed. I know you don’t really have to turn the lights off, LEDs burn so cool, but safety is safety, and habit is habit, and anyhow it seems wrong not to let a tree have darkness. Sometimes after I unplugged it I stood with it and looked at it, silent and dark in the dark room, lit only by the glow of the small electric candle behind it that illuminates the sign in the window that says PEACE. The candle cast faint, complicated shadows up on the ceiling through the branches and needles. The tree smelled lovely in the dark.
So Christmas went, and the New Year came, and on the day after New Year’s Day I said we ought to take the tree down, so we did. I wanted to keep it one more day after we took the lights and ornaments off. I liked the tree so much without any decorations. I didn’t want to lose that quiet presence in the room. It hadn’t even started to drop needles. But Atticus is not one for half measures. He took the tree out into the garden and did what had to be done.
He has told me that when it came time for his father to kill the pig he’d raised by hand all year, he’d hire a man to do it, and would leave the house and not come back till the sausage was being made. But Atticus did this deed himself.
After all, the tree had already been cut from its root; its life with us was only a slow dying. A real Christmas tree, a cut tree, is a ritual sacrifice. Better not to deny the fact, but to accept and ponder it.
He saved me some of the dark branches to put in water in a bowl in the front hall. When the trunk dries out it will be good firewood. Next Christmas, maybe.
The Horsies Upstairs
January 2011
ON THE EVE of Christmas Eve the family was all out in the forest where my daughter and son-in-law and three dogs and three horses and a cat live. Three of them live in the horse barn and the pasture at the top of the hill, five of them in the log-cabin-style house at the bottom of the hill, and one of them in great style in a studio cottage with a heating pad all her own, which in winter she deserts only to hunt mice in the woods. That afternoon it was raining, as it had been all December, so everybody was inside, and the kitchen-living-dining room was pretty full of people, the eldest eighty-three and the youngest two.
The two-year-old, Leila, was visiting with her mother and her step-aunt from Toronto. Seven of us had come over for the afternoon, and six were staying there—the hosts upstairs, the Torontans in the study, and one hardy soul out in the trailer. (There is no bed in the studio cottage and Mimi does not share her heating pad.) The dogs were circulating freely among us and there were many good things to eat, arousing much interest in the dogs. For anybody as young as Leila, it must have seemed pretty crowded and noisy and full of strangers and strangeness, but she took it all in with bright eyes and sweet equanimity.
That morning, when it stopped raining for a while, she had gone up the long, steep driveway with the women to the horse barn and riding ring. They played with pretty Icelandic Perla, and Hank, who stands a stalwart ten hands high and is convinced of his authority as the only horse (as opposed to mare) on the premises. Leila sat in the saddle in front of Aunty Cawoline on Melody, the kind, wise, old cutting horse, and very much enjoyed her riding lesson. When Mel picked up her pace, Leila bounced up and down, up and down, and softly sang “Twot! Twot! Twot! Twot!” round and round the ring.
So then, that afternoon, indoors, at some point among the various conversations, somebody said it would be dark before you knew it. And somebody else said, “Pretty soon we’d better go up and feed the horses.”
Leila took this in. Her eyes grew a little brighter. She turned to her mother and asked in a small hopeful voice, “Are the horsies upstairs?”
Her mother gently explained that the horsies were not up in the loft but up in the pasture at the top of the hill. Leila nodded, a little disappointed perhaps, but acceptant.
And I carried her question away with me to smile over and to ponder.
It was both charming and logical. In Toronto, in the limited world of a two-year-old, when somebody talked of going “up,” it would almost always mean “upstairs.”
And to Leila the log-walled house, which is very tall though not really very large, must have seemed immense, labyrinthine, unpredictable, with its doors and staircases and basement and loft and porch, everything unexpected, so that you enter the back door at ground level, walk through the house, and go down a long flight of steps to get to ground level… Leila had probably been up the loft stairs to the bedroom only once, if at all.
Anything could be up those stairs. Melody, Perla, and Hank could be there. Santa Claus could be there. God could be there.
How does a child arrange a vast world that is always turning out new stuff? She does it the best she can, and doesn’t bother with what she can’t until she has to. That is my Theory of Child Development.
I wrote a short story once, all of which was true, about going to a conference on the Northern California coast among the redwoods and having not the faintest idea I’d ever seen the place, the cabins, the creek, before—until I was told, and realized it was true, that I’d lived there for two intense weeks of two summers—that this very place was Timbertall, the summer camp my friends and I went to when we were thirteen and fourteen.
At that age, absolutely all I had noticed enough to remember about the location of Timbertall was that we all got on a bus and rode north for hours and hours talking the whole way, and got off, and were there. Wherever there was. There was where we were. With the creek, and the cabins, the huge stumps, the high dark trees, and us, still talking, and the horses.
Oh, yes, there were horsies up there too. That’s why we were there. That was what mattered, at that age.
I was a kid who, thanks to a wooden jigsaw puzzle of the U.S.A., had the states fairly well located, and had been taught enough geography to acquire some notion of continents and nations. And I knew the redwood country was north of Berkeley, because my parents had driven with me and my brother up that coast when I was nine, and my father was always clear about compass directions.