Maggie's Farm

Bird Dog,
When I read "the dude abides" I had a rush of memory, back to a day long, long ago in rural Western Pennsylvania. My twin brother, Roger, and I must have been, Oh, I guess, seven years old. We were out playing cowboys and Indians with our new Christmas cap pistols on a cold, muddy early January day when we ran around behind the old gray barn down by the creek. There, on what we called the junk pile, forlorn, haggard, a mere skeleton of itself, lay our family's Christmas tree on a sort of catafalque of pine needles. A few five & ten icicles glittered in the morning breeze from its denuded branches. We both stopped, gawking at what had only a few days earlier been the glory of our living room. Hardly a week, it seemed, had passed since we had participated in the family ritual of trudging out into the woods behind our house with flashlights and a hatchet to find this tree and cut it down and drag it back home to be decorated. I remembered being choked almost to tears by the sight before us. We both agreed that this was no way to treat the "good old Christmas tree" that had been the center of such joy. Tucking our pistols in our belts, we pulled the tree from its ignominious graveyard and began dragging it down the road from the barn to the house. I said I would retrieve the tree stand from the coal shed and Roger said he knew where to find the ornaments under the stairs. By the time we reached the kitchen door the tree had left a trail of needles and fake icicles but acquired a not inconsiderable "patina" of mud. We had the thing halfway through the door when my grandmother walked into the kitchen. She was a formidable woman, capable of making us tremble, or worse. We were made to tremble, and to expect worse if we did not get that tree "out of here" and come back to clean the needles and mud off the linoleum. In fear and sadness, we dragged the tree back. Christmas was over. And big people sure did see the world differently than we did.