Light Space

This year's Christmas tree is a feathery thing. A tree with spaces, on which the lights and ornaments suspend in air. I'm sitting on the couch looking at it. The morning is sunny. Light streams through the front door windows, and the brilliance is almost too much for this year's tree, airy as it is. Its smaller branches and thinnest needles are absorbed into that shine. It's the spaces that the sun lights up. I guess I never thought of that before.

            This year's Christmas tree is the first we've had for two years. In 2003 John's chemotherapy prevented us from bringing one in, and last year's recovery was long and only just begun as Christmas rolled around. So we hung some ornaments on doorknobs and light fixtures, set up the manger scenes, and put a few lights on the porch railing. But this year—this year we've survived the biggest challenge of our lives and it's time for celebration.

            We thought we'd go to the tree farm yesterday and find a lush tree, one of those they trim each year to make them full. The fullness causes opacity; I never thought of that before. But as we finished our lunch John mentioned a fir tree growing down the hill, one of several that he'd noticed just the other day as he was standing by the garage and looking down the hillside towards the woods. I suppose we've looked at those trees from time to time ever since we moved here over five years ago, but the other day one of them looked just like a Christmas tree to John. "Do you think we should check it out?" he asked me.

            When we were children in Minnesota both of our fathers brought home Christmas trees they'd cut in the stands of balsam, spruce and fir by Lake of the Woods. Now John and I got to reminiscing over those days back in the Forties and Fifties. My dad brought home a balsam, when he could find one, because of the spaces between branches that gave more room for the candles. We used electric strings of lights by then, but he never lost his nostalgia for the flickering candles of his own childhood. John added to the stories with his about hitching up the team of horses to a sleigh and going out to the ridges with his brothers to find the perfect tree. They'd bring back four or five so that their mother could choose the one she wanted for the living room.

            Yesterday we put our jackets on and our gloves, and John took the saw. He pointed down the hill to the scattering of fir trees, and I saw immediately the one he meant. We didn't cut it right away, of course, because part of the joy is in the search. So we walked all around the nine acres of our woods and examined every fir tree that was not more than seven feet tall. In the end we returned to the original tree and I held the thin, straight trunk while John sawed it down.

            Last night we trimmed it, our feathery tree, still so young, so new, so full of space and light. We lifted from the Christmas box one ornament at a time, remembering when we bought it because it represented something significant that had happened to us that year. We found for each the perfect space. And when we finished and sat on the couch to admire this tree that grew for us these years while we weren't noticing, while we were simply struggling to survive, I saw how this tree is an image our lives--that it's the essential that endures and the spaces we clear of the non-essentials that hold most light.