Holiday Leftovers

That boy was the caricature of the Virginia Pine next to our stove.

Six-foot four-inches with a wide, goofy smile,

and lanky arms that looked like fallen branches.

His flannel made him look like the lumberjack,

but we’d bought the tree in a church parking lot on December 28th.

Such an unusual act of charity is only done by people who drive past tree lots and cry,

because the trees had no chance to be used,

but really because their hearts are so fragile as to break upon seeing the unwanted.

We are those people.

We bought one, too tall and too thin,

and put it in our kitchen.

We adorned it in ornaments, though most of them dropped to the tile floor

and shattered like icicles.

He shrugged and said, what is there to do? And I didn’t know.

But I smiled and laughed, and so did he.

At the brokenness.

December 2016