My Tree

When I lived in New Jersey I would go out and pay a LOT of money for the biggest Christmas tree I could find for my development house living room.  I would spend a month devoted to decorating my five bedroom, four bathroom, Dutch Colonial with the perfectly manicured 3/4 acre lot.  I had a large weeping cherry tree that I would wind Christmas lights around every branch.  I drove up and down in front of my house at night to check the decorations people would see in the living room as they drove by in their cars.  My fireplace mantle was a top priority, with imported nutcrackers standing at attention, in graduated heights, among candlesticks and fresh pine boughs.  My children's stockings were sewn by myself and hand quilted, of course.  My life has changed so dramatically over the last few years and it's taken some getting used to.  I have no idea where my imported German nutcrackers are, and I don't have a mantle.   I now live in a tiny apartment, with only one bathroom - horrors! - and a teeny tiny kitchen.  My beast of a wood stove is on a slate slab with fireproof wall covering behind it.   What I do have is the most gigantic and wondrous BARN where my beautiful animals live.  Front and center in the barn yard is the most magnificent Christmas tree in the whole wide world.  Who needs Rockefeller Center?  I adore this tree.  She gives me beautiful pine cones every year and shelters the birds who come back and forth to the feeder.  I can tell the weather by looking out the window and checking the sway of her branches.  This tree shelters Knut, who lives under her in the summer, and me, when I sit at the picnic table and sip my coffee.  If I had money to burn I suppose I would get a cherry picker in here and string lights from the lovely branches at Christmas time.  Maybe not.  She is perfect just the way she is.