Hold Tight and Pretend It's a Plan

Well, that's not fair.  Our neighbors are not Scrooges or Grinches.  They are friendly and helpful and happy to talk about what makes the perfect Christmas tree. They cheerfully carry the chosen tree to the car and tie it on the roof, as carefully as if it were their own car and their own tree. Jon and I are less interested in the whole conversation and we get a little more Grinchy every year. If it were up to Jon, we would have stopped selling trees years ago.  That is one reason he is looking forward to the upcoming disruption of the road widening next year -- we may not even be able to have a tree lot. Carrie and I have voted to keep selling trees until we can't, so we continue. Sixteen years ago our brother-in-law decided he was finished with the tree business and he offered it to Blueberry Hill as a community activity. He hasn't touched a tree since, except for helping with clean-up at the end. One of the reasons he gave it up was he was allergic to the trees and i...

I came home from a long meeting at the temple, walking in the door a little before 9:30 last night.  Jon was already at work -- the counter was covered with large chunks of red meat waiting for attention, sharp knives and cutting boards, a box of nitrile exam gloves, big stainless steel bowls.  I took off my coat, washed my hands, got some gloves on and sat down at the counter for a couple of hours. We don't think anything of this anymore but when we first started butchering and packaging and freezing venison, it was really hard and it felt like it took forever.  As I try to remember when we started doing this, I picture Rebecca coming down the stairs when she was in high school and seeing us at work, expressing her disgust at the scene, and going back up to her room. I remember another time when Jon's back was hurting so much that he couldn't get out of bed, so that was before 2009. That time I had to butcher a whole big deer all by myself. It took over five hours. I...