Today has been a cool fall day with hints of the coming cooler weather of winter. Walked Penelope and took note of all the colors in the marbled sky, grays and whites and hints of turquoise and purple. These little colorful hues come and go so fast if you’re not watching you miss them. You don’t think about beauty in an overcast sky but look and you’ll see Mother Nature is using her pale watercolors subduedly.

Had to take Penelope to vet doctor brother this morning. Her coughs sounded like my children when they had the croup. Kept me up and down all night and if she wasn’t coughing she was scratching her ears, jiggling her jewelry as my son calls her tags. I gave her a little honey at 3 am and she stopped coughing long enough for both of us to go to sleep. She had a double ear infection, didn’t even know dogs could get this. She got a shot, antibiotic for her ears, a toe nail clipping, and a flea pill. She loves to go to the clinic and knows when I say “car” she’s going to see vet brother.

I’ve never had a dog that was “delicate” as vet brother calls her. We grew up with yard dogs. If you don’t know what a yard dog is, let me explain. You don’t buy dog food, they eat leftover collars and cornbread and their cast iron stomachs can occasionally gnaw a deer leg and not get sick. My daddy had a large hardware store and had a Purina franchise but never bothered to bring home a bag of dog food.

Yard dogs unashamedly scratch their fleas and bathe in the creeks. They don’t come in the house even in inclement weather. Always slept outside in the ice storms, resting on the cold tile of the front porch. They are faithful and loving and consider the town’s yards and downtown area as theirs. Most folks in the neighborhood know them by name and leave water and an occasional treat outside for them. They were healthy and happy, never got a rabies shot, didn’t get killed by a speeding car, just walked into the woods on their last day on earth and passed on. This little dog of mine always gets the croup on Social Security check day. My brother says, “She’s delicate.” Delicate? Yeah…more like spoiled.

Wanted to have a Christmas tree this year like I had as a child. My son Thomas carried me up our family farm, to the acerage Chief and I gave him, and he and the children cut me three cedars. I finished decorating the tree in the dining room and it looks just like the ones I remembered as a child. Course we only had one tree. I might have a tree in every room. The tree is decorated with nothing but lights and colored glass balls. I did stick a few bird ornaments in the top of the tree.

I didn’t have a tree stand so I put the tree in Daddy’s old pressure cooker with some bricks and tied it to a nail on the wall. I admit I did tear up and have a flood of memories from my childhood. The cedar tree in the living room is lots bigger and I bought strings of large lights for that tree. When I was little, if you touched one of those big bulbs they were hot as firecrackers. Don’t think the new ones are like that.

Testing the tree lights was a job my baby brother and I took seriously. The day we got out of school for Christmas vacation, we’d stretch the strings of lights from the sun room all the way to the dining room, plug them in and replace the burned out bulbs. That marked the beginning of Christmas for us. Daddy would go up to the farm and get a cedar tree. I know we must have gone with him but I can’t remember it. Can’t remember Daddy helping us decorate them, either. He’d just sit and watch, probably served as a referee when the four of us started throwing tinsel.

For years, Chief and I always came to Roanoke every other weekend. One Christmas I decided I wanted to stay the whole week of Christmas here. I’d do all this decorating for our family’s Christmas dinner, wear myself out, and never get to relax and enjoy it. It was an unusually cold winter and we ran the heat all week. The gas bill for that month was outrageous. We could barely afford to pay it. We decided to just stay home in Alexander City in January and February and come back for the weekend when the weather had moderated. My oldest brother would occasional check on the house for us.

For some unknown reason I forgot I had not taken down the Christmas decorations. And they were everywhere, even had Christmas trees decorated with costume jewelry in the bathrooms. I think we didn’t come for the weekend till March. I unlocked the front door and there was a huge cedar tree in the corner of the living room, still fully decorated, and every needle on that tree literally fell off and hit the floor with a loud whoosh. I just cried at the mess. Chief just laughed, just like he did when the raccoons partied in the living room. I’d cry and he’d laugh! Bless his heart, he cheerfully helped me clean it up.

Chief swept up two large brown grocery store sacks of needles and broken balls. We drug the naked stem of a tree outside and pulled the lights off. I had left cedar branches on all the mantles and the long window sill in the kitchen. That was not a fun weekend. And we had no vacuum cleaner.

I’ve already got three cedar trees in the house now. I’m trying to keep them watered well. I hope we make it through Christmas with only a few falling needles.

“Some Christmas tree ornaments do a lot more than glitter and glow, they represent a gift of love given a long time ago.” — Tom Baker