O Tannenbaum

We drove out to a country-ish place this past weekend to choose, cut, and bring home a Christmas tree. For all of my fellow Salemites, you may know that the Salem area actually exports Christmas trees to other places. One need not drive more than five minutes to get to a Christmas tree farm in Salem so having to drive 45 minutes to get city-free seemed like a lot of effort. Once we arrived at the tree farm we wandered around until we found our perfect tree. I believe it is a Grand Fir, but it's only 5 ft. tall, so it's just a baby. It smells extremely festive. We lifted our tree into the truck bed and headed back to the city to put it in our house. The hour that we were at the Christmas tree farm was the best I've had in weeks. We were in the country and surrounded by wide open spaces. There were other farms and some scattered deciduous trees but no buildings above a story high interrupted my line of sight. I felt like I could breathe for the first time in who knows how long. I have slowly been adjusting to life in the big city; I no longer feel like I'm suffocating all the time for lack of space but visiting that open space made me realize how constrained I'd been feeling before.

When we brought Ollivander, our tree, home that night I immediately began the festive process. I dug out the box of Christmas decorations, strung the lights, hung the ornaments, and made the house look festive and cozy. Ricky and I are both so on top of things that the tree already has all of it's presents wrapped and underneath of it. I've had the Christmas playlist going for over a week and Christmas cheer abounds within my dwelling, it's almost enough. The joy of this season is almost enough to mask my feelings of lonliness and longing for home, almost enough to make me okay with being here. I feel mostly happy but can still feel a little creature lurking inside of me that's grumbling and murmuring. Luckily, December is when I love Ricky the most. I love him all the time of course, but since we started dating during December, the month makes me feel extra great about our relationship. After this next week we will have survived his first term of graduate school and can then do our best to enjoy this time.

I know that this post doesn't really say much or have a point. I've been looking at my blogger dashboard for weeks and telling myself I should write but have been feeling to starved for inspiration to do so. This lame update will have to suffice for now.