We said good-by to our Christmas tree last night.  It was an orphan tree we rescued:  an ice storm brought down a large branch from our large white pine and I sawed off part of it and brought the remainder in to use as a Christmas tree.

We first placed the trunk of it in a base and then we had to prop it up:  it sagged so we ran a rope from it to the ceiling and tied it down to the floor with the help of a basket moored to the floor by some weights.

My wife strung several hundred multicolored lights throughout it.  It looked absolutely beautiful lit up.  And we admired it several weeks.  It was one of the prettiest trees we ever had.

Tonight my wife stripped it of needles dropping them in a bucket.  She wanted to lay them in the flower bed.  We did not want to leave the bare tree naked and abandoned in our living room overnight so I brought it out and lay it outside for its final resting place.  It served us well.

Certain things about my wife drive me nuts.  For a start, we have old computers hidden in all corners of the house.  Some of the operating systems even run on DOS (before Windows came out).  She can’t bear to part with them.  We even have software for these “dinosaurs”.

Some of the computers crashed but she still entertained the idea of salvaging the hard drives on them and the 1000’s of graphics she had stored on them.  I can not understand any of this.  These things are driving me crazy.

I am still flabbergasted we actually straightened up one room, started from scratch, put a new rug in it and furnished it.  It is our office and incidentally our favorite room in the house.  I become happy when I go in it.

In that room, though, is a pile of old catalogs–years old that she collected and stacked between the two clothes closets.  She could not possibly order any thing from these catalogs.  They are too old.

I even ordered current catalogs from the ones she especially liked but it made no difference she would not discard the old ones.

I guess she is a pack rat.  All this is driving me a little bonkers.  But I chose to ignore my frustration.  There are too many things I love about my wife.  And I am sure there are things I do that drive her nuts too.

I noticed the small pine tree in the pot outside near the driveway.  It was only three inches tall.  I wanted to transplant it on my property–somewhere I would remember and see how big it grew.  And then remember how small it once was.

All trees were once seeds strewn in the wind.  This property bought by my wife almost thirty years ago was barren and now the bushes are gigantic and woods and grass and trees are all over.  The land surrounding the house is no longer bare.

I wanted to see how much time the Lord afforded me.  I wanted to observe this small pine growing up and see if I could remember when it was this small.  At the beginning of the twentieth century the United States was denuded of much of its forests.

And they grew back.  I wanted to see how much time I would have.  I want to watch this small tree grow tall.