Just One Cedar

This post has nothing to do with gardening or cooking, but since it's my blog, it seems like a good place to park this.  This is true story from my childhood growing up in Mississippi.  I have told this story to some of my friends and my momma gets me to tell it to her. most every year.   

     

For my whole life, when my momma comes across a cedar tree she will pinch off a piece and crush it and take a long, slow smell.  “Oh, it’s just like a memory drug!” she’ll say.  She has told me that all the Christmases when she was a little girl come flooding back.  I’ll smell that same cedar, and I have memories that flood back too, but for me those memories are of a very particular Christmas.

     When I was young, we always went and cut a Christmas tree on the Saturday two weeks before Christmas.  I would get out the calendar and get Momma to pinpoint which Saturday that would be, since of course rarely fell exactly 14 days before.  On the designated Saturday we would go to the old home place in Caledonia to find a cedar tree.  As a girl, she had spent many hours tramping those woods and knew the places to look.  My brother, Marty and I went with her.  Sometimes it was cold, but in Mississippi a December day is just as likely to be shirt-sleeve weather.  Getting a tree wasn’t something Daddy participated in; this was Momma’s joy.  

     But in December of 1973, my momma was in the hospital.  I was in 6th grade.  Marty would have been in 3rd.  They said it was hepatitis.  I didn’t know what that was, but I did know that often as we changed classes at school, the teachers would wait until almost everyone was gone and would ask, “Missy, how’s your momma?”  They asked often.  I felt like that meant there was something somebody wasn’t telling me, but I didn’t ask.  In those days, you just didn’t ask.  One day Daddy told us, “Your momma might not be home for Christmas.  She’s real sad.”  He said we would need to be brave to help her.  He didn’t say brave, but that’s the word I said to myself.  He said not to say anything to her about it. 

     I don’t know how long she was in the hospital.  I don’t know if it was a week or two weeks.  I those days, you could not go up to visit anyone in the hospital if you were under 12.  I was under 12.  I would be 12 in January.  Those were the rules, so she had us call her every day just as soon as we got in from school.  But we didn’t mention Christmas. 

     I kept checking the calendar.  I figured out which Saturday counted as “two weeks before.”  As the day grew closer, I didn’t say anything about a tree to Daddy, but I knew when THE day was to be.  I was just going to let it pass.  

     But on that Saturday morning Daddy got a call and as he hurriedly changed clothes, he said, “I’m going to the hospital and I might be bringing Momma home!  I don’t know for sure yet.”  He said something about blood tests and he left.  

     Momma might come home on Christmas tree day!  But she was sick so I knew we couldn’t GO get one.   I thought maybe, just maybe I could find one on our property.   We had 50 acres, and I had walked all over that place.  Some was pasture, and some was woods.  But I had never seen even one cedar tree on that whole place.  Big pine trees, oak trees, and sweet gums.  No cedars.  But I had to try.  I knew it would make Momma so happy if she knew the Christmas tree was taken care of.  So I headed out. 

     I walked.  And walked.  And walked.  I looked at all the edges where they were most likely to be found.  I had never seen one on the place before…  But I hadn’t been really looking for cedars in particular before, so there was a chance.  I kept walking, and I kept looking.  And I prayed.  I prayed for just ONE cedar.  

     Finally, there was no place left to look.  I had gone all around the edges of both pastures.  There was no point in looking deep in the woods because they don’t grow there.  I gave up and headed toward the house.  And the tears slowly fell.  Me, who never cried.  I had tried so hard.  It had been a great plan, but it didn’t work out.  I was so disappointed.  I wasn’t disappointed about not having a Christmas tree; I was disappointed that I hadn’t been able to do this great thing for Momma — IF she got to come home.  That part might not even happen anyway.  I walked back to the house a familiar way.  As I got into the front field, I looked up and, low and behold, there were three cedar trees!  They were all in a row along an old, long-since abandoned fence row.  I had never seen them before, and I had been in that area lots of times.  Marty and I rode our ponies there all the time.  But there they were.  A miracle!  

     Soon Daddy pulled in with Momma in the car!  We couldn’t even give her a hug because of germs.  That was part of the deal of her getting to come home — no contact.  As soon as I could I told her about the tree.  “You won’t believe it!” I said.  Daddy got the saw, and we went and cut one of those trees, the best one and dragged it home.  I think maybe our old tree stand was too small or something, but I had read in a magazine that you could put a tree in a bucket of wet sand and that would hold it up and keep it fresh.  So I got a 5-gallon metal paint bucket, and shoveled sand into it.  We set the tree up in it, and to make it look okay I put aluminum foil around that bucket.  Beautiful.  It really and truly was.  And Momma was home on Christmas Tree Day, and we had a miracle Christmas tree.  A cedar tree prayed for by a little girl.   

***Note:  I did write a song about this with the same title around 2002 as a Christmas gift to Momma and in 2004 recorded a simple version for her.  It's not a song we perform in the band or anything, but it's special nonetheless in other ways.  (I'm telling this because invariably someone will say that I should write a song about it.)