Tinsel and Other Shiny Treachery

January 2, 2005

I wanted to put tinsel on the Christmas tree. It is a time-consuming, pain-staking, meticulous job that is, in my opinion, well worth every minute of the agony of carefully draping each flat metallic strand over the branches uniformly. The tree becomes a precious treasure, a glistening pyramid of diamonds, breathtaking and fragile. But I get lots of resistance from the rest of the residents at my house. They hate the static-charged threads clinging to their socks and dangling over the packages. Resentment builds at the thought of entangled garlands and bits of silver twisted into the ornament hooks. So I left the package of delicate foil ribbons in the bottom of the storage box.

It wasn’t long after Christmas that I got my wish for a shimmering tree. Mother Nature made them all sparkle with a thick coat of freezing rain. Not only did she decorate the tallest pines and the bare branches of oak and elm and cottonwood, but also the long slender grasses and the prickly rose bush shrubs. Intricate clumps of intertwining weeds glittered like glass tumbleweeds on top of the shaven soybean stubble and rusty barbed wire fences gleamed with clear icy shellac. Through no effort of my own, I was treated to a breathtakingly beautiful world of shimmering crystal. But Mother Nature didn’t stop there.

Skating down the polished mirror sidewalk to the glazed gravel driveway, I slid around the barn, making my way to the concrete feed bunks thickly enameled with a layer of glacial high gloss. The rubber lugs of four tractor tires had no more traction than my two deep-treaded boots. Even steel chains strapped tightly to the rear wheels could not bite deep enough into the sheet of ice covering the roadway to maintain control. As the machine glided sideways towards the ditch, I could only gasp and brace myself for the detour down the slick bank, coming to a stop just inches from a huge evergreen tree laden with shiny frozen droplets, absolutely dazzling in the late morning sun.

With more cattle to feed a few miles away, we had to think about a plan of action. I vetoed the proposal to modify a set of old skid loader chains to fit the 4-wheeler. The reasoning behind the idea made sense, but I wasn’t sure that driving a vehicle that was made to drive both on and off the road was the safest solution. I did consent to and assist with adapting a set of chains to fit the back tires of the pickup. We chose the levelest route, took the cell phone, and loaded up some sand and grit for the trip. We proceeded with a great deal of caution, and a renewed sense of how our world can be both beautiful and treacherous at the same time.

By Patsy Bronner