“ OUCH” he says, and I cringe.
“That must have hurt,” I tell him, handing over yet another string of seemingly endless Christmas lights.
The bitter cold makes the strings difficult to untangle, and as he stood up he hit something hard with his head.
Gloves not holding out the bitter cold, sun laughing at our weak attempts to warm up in it’s rays.
“Stupid hanging baskets” he mutters, probably thinking why on earth do they have to be hanging around.
A good question I suppose, maybe someone forgot to take them down?
Or maybe someone [I guess it was me] was going to fluff them out a bit more with some seasonal winter decor.
Adding some crisp, fragrant evergreen branches gathered from the farm, and p inecones foraged from beneath the towering pines that lined the bluff.
A few festive ribbons, some lights, and the seasonal decorating would be done before the weather turned.
But then… life, stuff, things, got in the way.
It got put off for another day.
And another.
The beautiful Autumn weather ebbed away… sure I added a branch or two, even a armful of dried hydrangea blooms that I managed to cut in the garden before Nature turned on us.
The hanging baskets hung, like laundry half dried, finished to the eyes from the street, but not equal to what I had in my head.
And then it got cold.
A early cold snap, my ex farmer neighbour told me… it might even last a while.
Cold as in very, very cold, frozen icicles made from clear dripping water kind of cold.
Hat, and gloves, plug your truck in, wrap that scarf, and scrape the windshield each time you go out kind of cold.
Slippery roads, and frozen ground feathered with snow.
The pinecones sat waiting, chores needed to be done.
And it got colder.
Perfectly useful evergreen branches fell from trees during nightly snowfalls. Slipping through trees, noises cracking us awake in the middle of the night.
Mornings brought them to light, frozen to the ground, ice and snow sticking like Velcro.
The calendar rolled on, like it always does, despite the piling up of things to be done.
Seasonal decorating got moved back until it warmed up.
It continued to get colder and colder.
There hang the baskets, beautiful, dark cone shaped, filled with branches, and twigs, hydrangea blossoms all pushed into soil that once, long ago, wasn’t frozen solid.
Now it is cold.
And unless I’m willing to bring out a blow torch and risk a fire, nothing is going to melt that icy soil in time for Christmas.
Ah, the lament of those that put things off.
But for every procrastinator there is a optimist’s exclamation.
You never know, maybe the weather’s going to break!