December 8, 2017, Columbia (Missouri.)
It’s Christmas coming already. Somebody told me one day that life was like a roll of toilet paper: the closer you are to the end the faster it goes. Yesterday was summer and tomorrow is Christmas, France is a long way behind, and the circus, it closed then reopened, and the leaves are brittle now and we are together again but we were never apart.
The furnace rumbles in the basement, underneath the living room sofas. It rattles like an animal waking up, full of discontent. It has turned cold in this warm autumn. We put the tree in the front yard as I had dreamed. It is a tree made out of metal rods and plastic thread that you assemble from the bottom up, like a giant legged puzzle. Marcos found it on the curb at a house he worked on and picked it up and he gave it to us because he has no use for Christmas trees. The last and only other time we put it up it was in front of our motor home on the parking lot of the circus in Hugo, Oklahoma. We didn’t turn on the lights much because electricity was not on us. Here it is surrounded by the fruit trees I planted in a semi circle without wanting to when we moved to Columbia. The wind keeps toppling it down. It is beautiful, if a little smaller than I had imagined it would look in this perfect semi circle of life.
There is tiny red apple on one of the bare fruit trees, right next to the fake Christmas tree. It calls to the round shiny Christmas ornaments. If it’s still there after Christmas I will give it a name, for good measure.
