Week 13 Theme
“Tree! Tree! Tree! Tree!” Phoebe holds the little twinkling light in her hand, “pretty” she says and smiles. She is not quite two and her vocabulary is quite limited; within the last hour she has added two new words, “pretty” and “tree”.
This is our third year of putting up a real tree, it took Mike ten years to convince me the world would not end if we cut a tree at Christmas; can’t say that I’m convinced. It’s a little over six feet tall, round and full; lights and two ornaments that Zac made hang from it. The house smells homey.
Out on route nine we found it in a tree lot, with hundreds of others; several returned with us. Most Mainers will do anything to survive, a “Jack of All Trades” is what many are called; we are no acceptation. I never once thought I would take part in cutting a tree, let alone ninety five of them, but we did, Mike fired up the saw and I hauled them through the fields back to the truck and onto the trailer; a days labor for a pauper’s pay.
Mike got way ahead of me in the cluster on the hill side, I followed the sound of the saw – trudging in and hauling out but then it stopped. So, I stopped, lifted my eyes from the forest floor and stared out at the world before me. Atop of the hill, I could see for miles and miles – the tops of trees, the birds flying in circles, the roofs of homes and businesses in the distance, the clear blue sky; I took a deep breath in, the air felt so fresh.
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Ah, very nice, especially in conjunction with the pix to the right of the page.
ReplyDeleteGood vignette ending! Just the right tone and just the right place to stop--another sentence would have been a sentence too far.
And definitely moves from small to larger back to both small and large at the end. "Day's work for a pauper's pay" is a wonderful phrase.