“Hey Joe! What about this one? Should we leave it? Doesn’t look like much more than firewood to me.”
“Nope, we’re supposed to take everything. They can figure out what to do with it. We just cut’em and haul'em.”
*****
A deafening buzz in the snowy quietness, ended my life in the forest. I was the last tree cut and tossed on top of the load of my neighbours on a smelly grumbling thing. Cold air rushed through my sparse branches when we started to move. It didn’t make sense. I was lying down!
And now look at me. If you can. Down here, now at the bottom of a pile of lush, soft green trees. All shapes and sizes of humans come in here pawing through us all. When their hands find me, always by accident, they think I am part of some other much handsomer tree. At first they’d pull at me and then let go in disgust when they saw how bent my branches were.
*****
“Firewood – that’s all it’s good for.”
“That’s a charley brown Christmas tree if I ever saw one.”
“Someone will buy him – someone with no sense and too many decorations."
“Our room is far too grand for that ugly old stump. I don’t even know why they’ve kept it in this lot.”
****
Finally. I’m alone in the Christmas tree lot, lights still blinking over the sign that announced in big bold letters: ‘Fresh cut Christmas trees!’ Fresh! Hmph! I’ve been lying here in this muck moon to moon. All the others have gone and here I am – cold and lonely, with my bare bottom exposed for all to see. Soggy branches on one side and drying up on top! My branches feel stiffer and colder with each incredibly slow day. Being fire wood is beginning to sound good. Oh, I do wish that child would stop crying. He’s dripping salt water all over me. He’s holding my top branch so tight he’s going to take all my few remaining needles off!
Then I heard a soft voice reminding me of the breezes in the forest in springtime: “OK sweetie, he’s really not much! I don’t know what your dad’s going to think. You know what he said. He wanted a tall, bushy tree and this one is short and stumpy.”
Then I was being picked up out of the muck. It felt so good to at last to have the dirty half melted snow shaken onto the ground. I could hear my branches sigh with relief as the young mother tucked me in the back of the little family’s beat up old car. My branches began to relax, and my crooked trunk lay on a soft blanket in the warmth of the old car. The little one was no longer crying, thank goodness. One chubby little hand stretched from the front seat to hold onto an unruly twig at my very top. In old car’s warmth, I felt like a real decorated Christmas tree.
“I never thought it was such a bad little tree.
It’s not bad at all, really. Maybe it just needs a little love.”
~ A Charle Brown Christmas
**Author’s note: This is one of the first stories that I posted on my blog (December 2012). I have revised it considerably. It was an early attempt at telling a story from the perspective of a tree - with pretty good grammar and vocabulary!
