*****

so. i took this picture the other day. with thoughts of my mom.

this story probably won't come out right, but i'm gonna try.

her and i were sitting around the house and she was feeling pressure to decorate the outside for christmas. she obviously didn't feel much like doing it, but whatever.

she asked me if i would help her put some lights up.

she grabbed the extension cord, and the lights and we went out to the one tree (besides the enormous pine) in our yard. we had never done this before (i mean, i had experience toilet-papering, so i kinda knew what i was doing) but we had no idea how we were going to get it around the top of the tree so we looked at each other and tossed the one strand of lights that we had. no, we didn't get a ladder and no, we didn't have more than one strand of lights for the tree.

we tossed the strand, and instead of it coming back down and only hooking a little bit of itself on the tree, the whole fucking strand stayed in a mangled mess, high up in the tree.

we both almost peed our pants that night.

and she left it. and plugged them in.

fuck it.

it looked a lot like the above tree.

mom, i miss you.