For twenty five years Dan and I have had an equitable, amiable tree contract. He puts it up and I decorate. He is the laborer and I am the artistic director. Last night this agreeable working arrangement ended nastily. I absolutely will not place another ornament on that ugly, deformed, mutant and demonic tree, while Dan is just sure that he can make it stay up THIS time.
When Ammo called about his flight times, I even coldly said, "You're really too old for a Christmas tree, aren't you? You don't care if we don't have one this year, do you?"
There was a shocked silence, and then he said, "Mom, are you ok?"
"I am not ok. We have purchased a sociopathic tree that is flinging itself around the living room violently every time I decorate it."
"Mom," he said in this calm voice that was such an absolute CLONE of his father's, it was eerie. "Just leave it there, and I'll take care of it when I get home."
As if Ammo had ever put up a tree in his life. The only interaction he ever had with a tree was falling out of one, and for unknown reasons spending an entire day hammering one down in the back yard a couple of years ago. Literally. He hammered on this large dead tree until it fell over. Why?? we asked. Just to see if I could do it, he said. It's still there, lying across the ditch.
In fact, we could take the Xmas tree out to it and maybe they would mate and we could raise a forest of horizontal trees.
When Ammo was little, he would take all the plastic icicles , roll under the tree, and hang them from the bottom branches where no one else could see them-- all of them. He said he was making a forest. Then he would take a music box and lie under the tree looking up at the icicles and listening to "O Come All Ye Faithful" and humming to himself. We have it on tape and it makes me cry it is so precious, but it certainly doesn't qualify him to work with this dangerous tree.
Anyway- last night Dan and I reached an impasse. The tree is now upright, but bare. I refuse to decorate it. Dan says if it stays up for two days without ornaments, then we will decorate. I say that I am done with that tree forever. He has leaned it toward the wall so that if it falls it will just fall a little. If he thinks that reassures me he is wrong. This tree is evil and it will find a way to leap 20 feet to my beautifully decorated mantle and take it down too, if we are stupid enough to let it stay in the house.
Myers is making a wide berth around that tree- animals have a sixth sense about these things. He knows something is very wrong. |
