The Ornaments on His Mother’s Spruce

“I’ll tell you my rules,” she said. “Everything gets wired on, so I am not picking glass out of the walk in March. Nothing goes on the side by the sidewalk lower than a walker can reach. The lights go on an outdoor cord, into the covered outlet by the maintenance door, and they go off at nine. The ladder is for staff or family. I don’t want a single resident above the ground. And it all comes down by the sixth of January.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Marcus, you have a ladder?”

“Six-footer in the shed. And the orange cord.”

She pulled her cardigan closed and looked over at the building, at the long row of ground floor windows with the blinds half down.

“December is a long month in here, Mrs. Novak,” she said. “If that tree brings them to the windows, I’ll count it as therapy and put it in my report.”

Marcus carried one basket and I carried the other. We set them on the bench by the spruce and I looked up at Irene’s window.

She was already there.

Somebody had wheeled her up close to the glass, and she was sitting in her chair in her lavender housecoat with the afghan over her knees, watching me the way she used to watch a customer walk in with a stain.

I held up a hand. She held up hers.

Marcus went inside. A minute later I saw him behind her, leaning over to crank the window. They only open about four inches at Maple Glen, for safety. Four inches was enough.

“Diane.” Her voice came out thin through the gap, but it carried. “What in the world have you got?”

I reached in the basket and held up the first thing my hand found. It was the macaroni star.

Irene put her fingers flat against the glass.

“That’s Matthew’s,” she said. “First grade. Mrs. Bell’s class. He ate half the box before he glued a one of them.”

I had forgotten that.

I cut a length of the green wire, ran it through the loop of yarn, and twisted it tight around a branch about as high as my shoulder, on the side that faced her window.

“Lower,” Irene said. “He’d want it where the little ones can see.”

I moved it lower.

That was how we did it. I held each one up, and she named it through four inches of open window, and I wired it on.

“Jenny’s sled. She cried because the marker ran.”

“Helen’s snowflake. She made forty of those the winter her husband was laid off, and sold them at the church bazaar for a dollar, and would not take a cent more.”

“The Browns. Lord, don’t put that where I have to look at it.”

I put it around the back.

You cannot twist florist wire with gloves on, so I worked bare handed. The snow on the lawn was going blue, the way it does up here about a half hour before dark.

Marcus came back out with the ladder over his shoulder and the orange cord looped around his arm. He set the ladder on the far side of the tree, tested it twice on the frozen ground, and took the lights up himself.

He wound both strings around the top half of the spruce while I did the bottom half with the ornaments, and whenever I had one that wanted to go high I handed it up to him.

Somewhere in there I noticed the other windows.