My name is not Alexander, but if it were yesterday would have been my terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day. (Thank you Judith Voirst for those words.)
Okay, I know we pushed Christmas. We had a beautiful tree and not getting to see any of our family, it brought us joy to have the tree lit up in the early morning and late evening hours. But yesterday morning, it was decided. The tree HAD TO GO!
The back of our house is all windows – floor to ceiling. During the winter the sun floods the room and warms it up nicely. It is our morning ritual to open the shades and enjoy the sun while we drink our coffee. Yesterday, however, I discovered a swarm of bugs, mostly dead or dying. I am not a bug person by nature, but I don’t freak out about them (except of course the huge mountain spiders that roam the dark of night looking for their prey).
I followed a trail of these bugs to the Christmas tree. Deep inside the tree were webs and what looked like tiny little bugs suspended there. This was when I freaked out. As I took the ornaments off the tree, they were placed on an old bath towel. Once bare, it was time to take the tree out. This is a 12 ft tree that must be manhandled in order to get it outside. This meant the tree would need to be tipped and the idea of wrestling with this tree that was the home to some unknown creatures was the last thing I wanted to do. It only took about five minutes and the tree was finally outside.
Hubby brought the ShopVac in and I proceeded to vacuum up bugs and pine needles. Then we discovered little puddles of sap on our hardwood floor. Lovely. Hubby got a plastic scraper and got up what he could, then the floor cleaner did the rest. Afterward, I sat down with an antibacterial wipe and cleaned every ornament. The tree coming down led the way to all the other inside decorations coming down, boxed up and back in storage. This took us the majority of the day and I was exhausted. My shower was extra long and extra hot as was the water temperature in the washing machine when I washed our clothes. Yuck, yuck, yuck!
I am still not sure what these creatures were. Hubby said spiders, but they appeared to have wings – it was hard to tell. I thought maybe mosquitos but that does not make sense of the webs in the inner sanctum of the tree, but let’s go with mosquitos. The idea of spiders or even worse, winged spiders, would not let me sleep at night.
As horrible as it was, it was a distraction from the reality spinning around outside. Not that I ever want to repeat it. In all my life of having a real Christmas tree, this has never happened. Let’s chalk it up to 2020 bleeding over into 2021.
In other news, I updated my Gravatar photo. My hair is no longer nicely coiffed, colored and curled. It has not been cut for over a year and any of my purple streaks that once existed have long faded away. This is the real me now – my hair, not quite as long as it once was way back in the day and no longer with any color of its own.
The sun is up and it is time to open the shades and enjoy the sunshine. This is how yesterday started. Let’s hope I am not in some horrible version of my own personal version of the movie “Groundhog Day”.
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