As Tall as You

I was recently thinking of January sneaking its way into my unprepared year and chewed that thought over with a friend. Billy cut down his first Christmas tree when he was six years old. He walked across the street into the Indiana forest with his little carpenter saw hanging straight down beside himself like his Dad taught him to carry it safely.

He didn’t feel the catch in his parent’s heartbeat as they watched him walk into the pine dome of a December afternoon. Dad said it could be no bigger than he. Hunting, and estimating, then using the saw as a marker against the top of his head and each tree, he found the one that maybe, just barely, rose above his head a tiny little bit so his parents may not notice if they measured. Mittens off, knees on ground, and a shimmy under, he bowed down and set his blade. The straight, long reach of his little man arms worked the handle until the teeth chewed through to the other side.

“I launched it to my shoulder,” He said to me during a business dinner, “And walked it out of the forest and right up to my bedroom.” Then he set it, and trimmed it and went to work making the rest of his life as deliberate as cutting a tree as tall as himself.