Robert's Rules

I was facilitating a meeting today at my new job, and someone suggested that we dispense with Robert's Rules of Order. Too formal, they said. All that "move" and "second" and "point of order" and "call the question" stuff.

And I countered with "well, WHICH Robert? Sure, we could use the old standard, but why? Why not come up with rules of order to structure conversation or shut people up based on OTHER Roberts?"

Robert Duvall's Rules of Order: "I love the smell of napalm in the morning."
Robert DeNiro's Rules of Order: "You talkin' to me???"
Robert Redford's Rules of Order: "Naturally blabby, I guess."



Ummmm, yeah. They didn't buy it. Not only that, there was an awkward silence as they all turned to me, in slow motion, no blinking, just blank puzzlement.

Unravelogue

The movers came, the movers went. They got started 5 hours after their scheduled arrival time.

Casualties: one whole side of an antique glass china cabinet; the top of an antique end table; sections of hardwood floor; sections of hallway into my condo; my nerves.

Things that stunned me: they didn't have boxcutters. Our only tool was the knifelet on my corkscrew. They brought in boxes willy-nilly, and THEN wanted to try to fit furniture in, in spite of my voiced concerns that there was going to be big trouble. Ultimately, they had to take boxes back out into the hallway to get the furniture in. They brought a leather recliner and dining table and chairs in that didn't belong to me, and then seemed mad that I wanted them to take them back out.

I have no idea how to deal with the china cabinet, still filled with glass.

I live in fear of starting to open the boxes marked "fragile."

And I want a big old prize for not indulging in felonious behavior when one of the guys, upon leaving, leaned on a stack of boxes, grinned, and said he was going to come back in a few days so I could play the piano for him.

But at least it's all here, and my king Tempur-pedic is made up and ready to welcome me, after a week of sleeping on a twin air mattress--which I can only liken to trying to relax and sleep on a Pilates stability ball.

So I'm crawling towards the finish line to my new, my real, home.

; )

Travelblogue, Final Day

The morning began early. I had slept well, having rid myself of yesterday's headache and having upgraded to a Snob Level hotel. After a quick shower and cup of coffee, I hit the road.

Montana was lovely, but I must confess my delight when I rounded a bend and a huge sign declaring "Welcome to Idaho" turned out to be the opening act for a series of beautiful postcard-worthy scenes clear to Coeur d'Alene. Unfortunately, road construction (and the winding nature of the roads even at their best) made it hard to capture any postcards of my own.

Once in Washington, I passed through Spokane. Uh-huh. A mall. A hospital. An Applebee's. 100 car dealerships. Done and done.

On the other side of Spokane, however, I started to worry that I had some sort of fatigue-induced dementia. What had been lush, green pine and spruce forests in the mountains turned abruptly into something that looked like a mars-scape. Really, I fully expected that little satellite/robot/ATV thingie (what was its name) to appear over one of the craters on this brown, arid desert. Flat. Did I say flat? It was, except for occasional rock blemishes on its otherwise FLAT complexion. I saw a cow. I have no idea what it was eating. There was nothing but dirt and rocks and some scrubby flora that couldn't possibly have been edible.

Finally, there were some irrigated fields in with the dirt plots, and on the horizon I saw what I thought was smoke billowing from a series of smokestacks. As I got closer, though, I saw that they were not smokestacks at all, but dirt devils. A whole troupe of them, cavorting and whirling on their dusty dancefloor. Stunning.

Sign, but not my favorite: Leaving Apple Maggot Quarantine Area (I didn't know I was in one. And what is an apple maggot?).

Once I approached Ellensburg, the Cascades were ahead of me, and then the adrenaline kicked in. I was only 100ish miles from Seattle, and I was ready to be done. I raced up and down mountain passes, taking a few random shots from my camera held up (I have some lovely studies of my dashboard, the empty water bottle--a few mountains, too).

I didn't even stop to go to the bathroom, which I had needed to do for the last couple of hours. That was a mistake, seeing as how I could NOT get to the entrance to my parking garage from the freeway exit. Oh, I knew how to get there--I was within spitting distance 6 or 7 times. I saw it from a number of angles. But between the construction of the light rail line by my apartment and the relentless NO TURNS and ONE WAY signs, I was granted no mercy by the Arrival Gods.

I finally made it, although I'm convinced it was via Vancouver.

And here I am. Everything is out of my car, and I'm sitting on the floor of my apartment on the 10th floor. My furniture won't arrive for a week, but I bought a corkscrew and a bottle of Ursa wine (a local Baer Winery red that I love), I'm tapping into someone's unsecured wireless network, I've christened my shower (oh, that was transcendent), and my inflatable bed is inflated and ready for me.

I am home.

Favorite sign: City of Seattle

Travelblogue, Day 4

I had an uneventful departure from Sheridan, WY, after a night in a motel room that confirms what I already feared: I am a snob. Well, it's not so much that I'm a snob--which I'll own--as that I don't like paying snob level prices for crappy accommodations. Are you buying it? ; )

The scenery was lovely, very Brokeback Mountain. In fact, I actually saw two cowboy-hatted guys on horses, perched on the ridge of a mountain, with cattle spread out on the hill below them. I had a visual, but I made it go away when I almost ran off the road.

First stop was Bozeman, Montana, where I had a passable lunch in a passable chain restaurant, and drank passable iced tea and copious amounts of water.

Next stop was Butte, where I burst into a Perkins with a bursting bladder and a raging headache. Dehydration? Altitude (I was on the Continental Divide, after all)? Lack of caffeine? To cover all bases, and after visiting the facilities, I drank more water and a cup of coffee. I had a waitress who was MAYBE 20. Heavily made up and world-weary, she asked how the coffee was, HON. I didn't have the heart to tell her that I was twice her age and that I should be calling HER "hon" and not vice versa. 20 is too young to trot out the "rode hard and put up wet" schtick, but I figured she was moonlighting at Perkins while trying to break into acting. She was probably just working on a 1940s diner waitress character.

The approach to Butte was fascinating. Huge mountain faces covered with round and oval, smooth, somewhat elongated boulders. They looked like they had just been stuck on the side as decoration: geological gumdrops on the side of a mountain cake. I also got my first whiff of evergreen. Followed quickly by Eau de Skunk.

By this time I was starting to realize that several days on the road were starting to wear on me. Sure, the vistas were beautiful. Of course, it was humbling to see nature's rich pageant. But people, I'm an extrovert! I was starting to talk to my steering wheel, shout laments to deer carcasses as I whizzed past them on the side of the road. This scared me.

I decided to call it a day in Missoula, Montana. I splurged on a somewhat nicer room than last night, where I plan to take a bath in a real bathtub, order up a glass of wine, and look forward to the last day of driving. Tomorrow I should be fresh for the views across Idaho and into Washington, and then...finally...will roll into my new hometown before rush hour.

Favorite sign today: TESTICLE FESTIVAL, outside of Missoula. I missed the dates, because I was so taken aback by the cartoon bull, eyes wide, mouth agape, standing upright and using his two front hooves to protect his naughty bits.

Travelblogue, Day 3

Away, I'm bound away...across the wide Missouri...

It started with the Corn Palace and ended with me leaving my suitcase outside my car in front of my motel room. Happily, the sandwich delivery guy in Sheridan, WY noticed it and brought it in with my sandwich. Even more happily, the populace in Sheridan, WY is honest and let it sit out there for over an hour.

But along the way, it was all about songs. As I rounded a bend in Chamberlain, SD and gasped at the flat landscape now descending into a valley, and beheld what I thought was a lake--but was, in fact, the Missouri River--I broke into Shenandoah. Then, in the Badlands, I saw the buffalo. Oh, give me a home, where the buffalo roam, and the deer and the antelope play... And finally, sitting in the Badlands Bar in Wall, SD, in a leatherette booth with a cheeseburger and iced tea, looking up the length of the dark bar and back to the pool tables, all packed with tourists and locals, and considering the image of Jenifer in her solitary booth with her bookish glasses, solemnly squirting bright yellow mustard onto her sesame seed bun, I burst into one of these things is not like the other... OK, well, that one I sang in my head, not wishing to have the Harley guys swagger over for a confrontation.

I can safely say that the Corn Palace and Wall Drug gave me my fix of Americana for the year. Holy moly. Now I know why we're in Iraq, because the number of RVs I saw today alone necessitates all kinds of oil. It was enough to make me want to turn around and head back to the Corn Palace, to beg them to convert that thing into ethanol, and fast.

Beautiful, dramatic thunderstorms as I crossed into Wyoming, and the 7,340 bugs that met their end on my windshield as I crossed the prairie were washed away.

Favorite sign of the day:

SAFE HAVEN SMALL ANIMAL HOSPITAL. HUNTERS WELCOME.

Tomorrow, the BIG mountains.

Travelblogue, Day 2

Up early, greeted the day with a goodbye to friends over breakfast at our local dive--the kind with old men, regulars, who drink coffee and play checkers every morning of the year.

Mid-pancakes, I get the cell phone call I hoped I wouldn't receive THIS time, even though I believed, in my cynical heart of hearts, that I would: the driver slated to pick up my worldly possessions "filled his truck" elsewhere and wouldn't be coming. My moving "consultant" (give me a break) suggested we just leave the packed goods in my house and load them when the next available truck was coming through. I pointed out to him that I had hotel reservations tonight, had someone scheduled to help me with the final cleaning, and was due in Seattle mid-week.

He pointed out to me that the only option would be to bring a local truck, load my stuff, take it back to their warehouse, offload for the weekend, and then re-load when they got a westbound truck. Such a lot of toting and lifting! I pointed out to him that I sort of considered that HIS PROBLEM AND NOT MINE. He started to point out to me that...STOP RIGHT THERE...I pointed out to him that he had best STFU and get moving. OK, I didn't really utter THAT, but let's just say that he knew from the steel edge in my voice to drop the phone and run, not walk, to gather his strapping lads and burn rubber.

[goodbye to my breakfast friends...my 90 year old friend brought the little figurine I gave her to remember me by, and set it on the table during the meal.]

So they came, they loaded. In the meantime, 3 more friends showed up to hold vigil over me and my fury. We were standing around out in the garage, and one guy brought out a bookcase from my study. The one next to the couch, where my cat had slept for many years of his 19-year old life, just ended in January. When the breeze hit the bookcase, the bottom shelf released tufts of his hair. They lifted up, floated in the sunlight, and then drifted away on the breeze. My friends became reverent, silent. I felt all the emotion from the past weeks of packing, of saying goodbye, of deciding to leave, of letting my feline companion go, of my whole life, of the life of all humanity...it all broke open and I sat down on the garage floor and wept. And wept and wept and wept.

After the movers left, my cleaning lady came over and helped me do the final run-through. Wiping out refrigerators, vacuuming, mopping...every pass of the rag an incantation: please let this house sell, please let this house sell soon.

Lunch with more friends. Standing outside the cafe, each one of us saying how we don't do goodbyes. So we didn't. Quick hugs all around, "see you during the holidays"--and we all turned on our heels and dispersed. Quickly.

Back to the house, the final walk-through. My best friend came, finally, to retrieve his vacuum cleaner. No words. Just tears and embraces.

The drive out of Minnesota and into South Dakota was marked by a timely phone call, great billboards, thunderstorms dancing all around me, Prairie Home Companion on the radio, and a bizarre sculpture of a longhorn bull rising up over the prairie.

I'm in Mitchell, SD. Tomorrow morning: the Corn Palace.

I am untethered.

It's OK.

Travelblogue, Day 1

So my house is all packed up.

After weeks of sorting, donating, discarding, procrastinating, sorting, and donating some more, the Professional Movers were to show up this morning bright and early to pack my dishes and such.

Now in the advertisements, these PMs are always crisply attired young women, with ponytails and sunny smiles, bearing pristine sheets of packing paper and tape guns.

What did I get? Cartman and Butthead, in sweat-stained baseball caps.

Highlight: my half-filled garbage bag on the kitchen counter, containing sandwich bits, cherry pits, the contents of the refrigerator crisper, and bacon grease (yes, I'm originally from the South, and we always have a jar of bacon grease in the refrigerator for seasoning greens) disappeared midway through the proceedings. Of course, Butthead packed it. He was incensed when I made him open up boxes to find it, and acted like it was MY fault for not identifying it with the rest of the "do not pack" items. EXCUSE ME? Do I really have to NAME a bag of trash as a "do not pack" item???

Now I'm in my room at the Americinn, where I will shower, then have The Last Supper With My Friends.

Back to the NoLongerMyHome house tomorrow morning to oversee the loading of my worldly possesions, then westward, ho!

She's leaving home. Bye-bye.

I have been in my current profession for 27 years, starting as a teaching assistant in graduate school. I've kept papers, class notes I took, books, and then later scholarly papers, syllabi for classes I taught, more books, files from committee meetings, student grades, student papers that were never picked up, research files...not to mention funny toys and notes and photographs given to me by students over the years.

Today was the day I left denial and went to my office to start clearing out and packing up.

I've procrastinated and procrastinated, because I knew how it would be.

I knew I couldn't toss stuff without looking at it.

I had a stomach-ache all morning and found every conceivable thing to do at home before I finally went to campus. But I went, and it was just as devastatingly tender as I had dreaded.

I barely made a dent in 5 hours, but I just had to leave it for a while. Too intense. I swung wildly from tossing whole drawers without looking, to sitting cross-legged on the floor re-reading a student paper from 1997 in its entirety, and back again.

This is what is known as liminal space. I'm between my old life and my new life, I'm residing in transition. It's raw here, and both exhilarating and terrifying.

So I cling to fixed points in my landscape one second and in the next one I long to get in my car and drive away, leaving absolutely everything behind.

I usually curse the fact that my friends are spread to the four winds, but today I take strange comfort in the knowledge that at least some of "my people" are not fixed geographically in the place I'm leaving.

Miss Eliza Jane Wilder

I just had my every-six-months exercise in humility and vulnerability. That's right, the teeth-cleaning. Maybe it's that I make my living with language, but being struck dumb because a latex-gloved hand and a sonic de-scaler are crammed into my mouth is just about the most powerless I ever feel.

On the upside, there was a re-run of Little House on the Prairie on the overhead TV, and Miss Eliza Jane Wilder, the spinster prairie schoolteacher, was featured in today's episode. And I kept thinking "OK, I'm a spinster prairie teacher, too, but I'm a ROCKSTAR compared to her and plus, I'm leaving and going to the west coast."

My new complimentary toothbrush is blue with a hot pink racing stripe and my complimentary floss is minty.

leaving on that midnight train to Georgia

Well, not really leaving. And not at midnight. And not on a train. And not to Georgia.



GOING. To a new job. A major step in my career trajectory.

IN JUNE. Or as soon as I can manage it in advance of a July 15 start date.

IN MY CAR. Just me. And my iMac. I'll trust everything else to movers.

TO SEATTLE. Be nice to me, people. I'm leaving folks I love behind.




...God, I hope this decision wasn't the result of a midlife crisis. That would suck, especially since it would have just been easier to take up skydiving or get a sports car or a 28-year old boyfriend or something.

; )

Lucy and Ethel Get a Pedicure

I'm in my black leatherette pedicure throne, minding my own business. The massage function is on "rolling"--intensity and heat level 9. I'm leafing through People magazine (and hoping no one I know catches me at it), sipping my Aveda "Comforting" tea, and otherwise languishing in the moment. My feet are happy in their sudsy bubbles, and only the pulled muscle in my shoulder reminds me that I am of this world.

In comes a woman my mother's age. She's a little anxious. She's never had a pedicure. Her nails are in bad shape. She's embarrassed by them. It wasn't her idea to do this. Her granddaughters gifted her this spa day. So what could she do? All this verbal handwringing elicits a practiced, sympathetic clucking from the pedicurist, and soon the poor woman is calmed down enough to clamber up and into the chair, with some help.

"Is the water too hot?" Fine.
"Do you need a magazine?" No.
"Can I bring you something to drink?" Coffee.

After this ritual, the pedicurist encourages the woman to lower her feet into the bubbles, and away she goes to gather the requested nail polish.

But alas: the woman with her feet submerged, just as she's relaxing into this new sensation, hits the handle of the faucet with her leg. Out flies the hose with the force of the water, flying madly and uncontrollably, spraying the terrified woman, the chair, the surrounding chair (luckily empty) and causing the cup of coffee to drop into the foot tub.

She and I are the only ones in the room, our pedicurists both out in the main salon. I, with my gimped up shoulder, am unable to turn completely to visually assess the situation, but I know it's dire. So I leap up out of the chair, feet dripping, and rush to her aid.

Almost. My feet are WET. And SOAPY. And the floor is slippery. So what should have been a gallant jaunt across the room turns out to be a kind of quasi-surfing maneuver that ends with my head in the woman's lap and my arms braced to catch my fall in her foot tub.

All's well that ends well, of course. We both survived.

Last I saw of that woman, she had great-looking toes but was on her way to the doctor to get her blood pressure medicine upped.

solstice/equinox

Driving home tonight, there were two deer standing on the frozen and snow-covered Minnesota River. It was dusk--the time they typically come down to the river to drink.

I wonder if they're surprised when they arrive and find that their river is ice. Do they walk out, one step after the other, hoping that it's just a little further?

At what point do they accept that it's for naught?

Do they turn around and go back where they came from?

Or do their hopeful steps lead them beyond the halfway point, to where it's easier to cross on over to the other side?

The winter solstice was December 21.
The spring equinox is March 21.

We're beyond halfway.

all over

I just got home from picking up my cat's ashes and certificate of cremation at the vet's office.

I waited until I thought I could go in there without causing a scene. 4 weeks to the day, it's been.

I was fine in the car. I was fine going in. I was fine greeting the familiar staff, even with their condolences. I was fine when the vet who euthanized him came out to greet me. I was fine when she went to the cupboard to retrieve the little box.

The box was in a little brown bag with a ribbon and a card--a little "memorial" poem, which I haven't read yet. Because the minute I took the bag, felt its light weight, and looked down onto the box and saw Eliot printed on it, I realized it was all over. It was all over.

It's all over.

Public. Private.

I always assumed I was a varsity-level external processor.

Hand-wringing about which food processor to buy, how to re-arrange my furniture, how to deal with a leaking water heater, why my colleague might be angry with me, what to cook for dinner--these have always been hashed out in public, with my friends and family.

I've been single all my life, and I always thought that needing all that feedback was a kind of handicap for a bachelorette. But there it was, and so I just took it as a further paradox in the long list of things that have struck me as quirky about myself.

But I had never tested this theory with grief. None of my most immediate family had died, no close friends. Somehow I'd been spared that. Until this past week when my cat died. I knew it was coming; I knew I would grieve.

What I didn't expect is how completely I switched into an internal mode. I didn't want support at the vet's clinic for the euthanasia; I was awkward in phone calls from my friends, as appreciative as I was of their care; I didn't leave the house; I let no one in; I was downright rude to my best friend, who came by to bring me a loaf of bread and sit with me.

The solitude was right. It was what I needed, as stunned as I am to acknowledge it. I needed to mope, wail, clutch toys to my chest, let dishes pile up, clean them, vacuum up cat hair, refuse to change my sheets where he had slept, forget he was gone, remember with a start, scrub and disinfect his litter box, clean his brushes, look at pictures, look under all the furniture for sparkly balls, choke up, smile at what my friends had remembered in their e-mails about him.

And I didn't need spectators.

Who knew? Grieving isn't made more difficult by being alone, at least for me. Quite the contrary.

I would never have imagined it.

full circle

I was 60 miles away, with a visiting friend, mourning in advance the day that my cat would die, while my cat was preparing to die that very night.

The day he died was the birthday of my great-grandmother.

Before she died, we were chatting about reincarnation, and she said if she believed in it, which she didn't, she would want to come back as my cat. She knew a good gig.

Today I went to a fabric store to help an elderly friend pick out fabric for a valance. She wants one in her room, and will hem the fabric by hand. She may not live to the end of the project, but she will work beauty in her hands on the way.

My great-grandmother made all my clothes when I was a child. She made matching outfits for my Barbies. I wish I had not traded them for a Monkees album.

The fabric store smelled like her sewing room. I brought a swatch of material home to consider for re-upholstering a chair in my living room. I laid it on the chair, which is still covered with my cat's fur.

It's perfect.

Eliot, Rest in Peace

It was time.

I returned home this evening to find my sturdy companion of 19 years staggering, disoriented, and distraught. He was diagnosed with the early stages of kidney failure two years ago, and in the last year had lost 3 pounds. He had been my constancy, my best example of unconditional love, my model for what a pet should be. I spoiled him rotten. He returned in kind. Lately he had taken to sleeping under the covers, curled in the crook of my arm.

Tonight he couldn't get in the litter box. Half in and half out, collapsed over the side, he turned and looked at me. I helped him in, I helped him out, then we laid together on the floor and I stroked him while he cried. I called the vet and she got out of bed and met us at the clinic.

I held him while she gave him the injection. She barely had it started when he gave into gravity and sank against me. A sign, she said, that he was ready.

He sat on my lap when I wrote my dissertation. He grieved when I traveled. He had a throaty, unique meow. He had violet eyes when he was a kitten. One time he got tangled up in a shopping bag and it chased him around the house. The faster he ran, the more the bag flapped and terrified him. My mom and I thought he would have a heart attack before we could rescue him from the Attack of the Dillard's Bag.

I loved him more than I've ever loved another living creature.

May he rest in peace.

I feel pretty, oh, so pretty.

I didn't MEAN to.

I just got back from a massage and my massage therapist has a very sweet black labrador that also serves as a service animal. This dog visits nursing homes and the like, and she has been trained not to lick, not to approach unless beckoned, not to bump up against someone (given that her "clients" are usually frail and could be knocked off-balance very easily, etc.). When she's in my therapist's office, she knows not to come around the curtain, but to stay on the "office" side.

I was out very late last night and because of the hell that is being 48 years old, was up at the regular time. Let's just say I didn't get enough sleep.

Combine no sleep with intense massage pleasure and the result for me is PUNCHY. So after the massage I was getting dressed on my side of the curtain and started giggling. I saw my whacked massage hair and giggled more uncontrollably, and burst into a rendition of "I FEEL PRETTY." Now, I've had some vocal training, and so when I burst into something it's with some lung power.

This dog leapt to her feet and raced around the curtain to see what unbelievable calamity had transpired. My CMT is shouting for her to come back, and so she starts running back and forth between her owner, whom she knows to obey, and me, who is now on the floor laughing. The CMT finally got the dog back on the right side, and calmed down.

I composed and dressed myself, and solemnly walked around to the couch to write my check. When I appeared, the dog stood straight up at attention, and then fell to the ground and rolled over on her back--unprecedented behavior, evidently.

I don't know if I'm a witch, or a dog whisperer, or what.

I'm still punchy, by the way, and I have another late night ahead of me.

Happily, I have no planned encounters with animals tomorrow.

my mind's eye

Approaching from the west, at fifty paces, I spy a twisted culvert half-buried in the snow.

Only I think it's an errant Canada goose, struck by a car perhaps, or shot from the sky. Its beak is pointing up and is open in mute mid-honk, cut off from its migratory impulse or lost to its goslings or too late for its calling as a holiday feast.

Closer, now, ten paces, I see it's only metal.

Epiphany 2007

O nata lux de lumine by Morten Lauridsen is on my iPod as I head out today. It's a two-pair-of-leggings Saturday, hovering around 32 degrees, but the sun is brazen, blazing over the fields on the edge of town.

The snow is deep and gashed over and across with snowmobile tracks. White snow, gold sun, blue sky, and the choir is perched on my shoulders, caressing my ears.

Tears form, my nose runs in the wind, and I can barely hear the crunchcrunchcrunch of my feet on the pavement. I could walk 100 miles like this.

There's no real epiphany, no concrete thing, no word made flesh, no light bulb. And yet, the elements have broken me open just a little. There are cracks and fissures, more like a map of smiles and grins, really, as I blink and sniff and think that I could have an awakening on this day…

Little Tree

Growing up down south, the procuring of the Christmas tree was never done on the parking lot of a grocery store. The notion that one would BUY a "foreign" tree--a fir, a spruce, a Norway pine--that was just crazy talk in my family.

No, we went out to our acreage in the foothills of the Ozarks, tramped around amidst persimmon trees and stickery weeds that stuck to your pants, across dried up creek beds, under steel grey skies, and then we haggled and argued over which of the many homely cedars we would cut. The point was not to get a PRETTY tree, but to get the tree living in the shadow of another one: stunted, second-best, the bridesmaid, never the bride.

Of course, the real story was about good stewardship: these were trees that would languish anyway, and so it made sense to cull them. But we were always given the hopeful adaptation: the narrative of the passed-over tree, always knowing it could be the best Christmas tree ever, if only given a chance.

We were little old country kids, and we knew full well that these were the trees closest to our identity...we knew we were choosing ourselves, we were giving ourselves permission to shine and become glorious, if adorned and loved.

Now I live up north, and I just bought a fir tree off the lot of a grocery store, the first tree I've had in many, many years. I brought it home and decorated it, all by myself. It's a lovely tree. It's fragrant. It's shapely.

And I can't relate to it at all.