Oof! and Boston and the Tree

I did something very stupid last Sunday night. Woody was watching a movie I found boring – long suffering male angst. I was lying on the couch and did something I never am even able to do outside my bed –I fell asleep. I was tired. We had put up our pagan tree a few days before, letting the cats get used to it, before we decorate. Sunday we decorated the entire tree. After I had dozed off, I turned on my left side and fell off the couch—oof! – and landed on my left shoulder. I thought nothing of it but by the next afternoon, I couldn’t raise my arm. The pain woke me at night. I went to my chiro who diagnosed it as a bone bruise. I was relieved it wasn’t a rotator cuff. Years ago on a 747 I was in the aisle seat in the middle when a man opened the luggage compartment over me and a suitcase that had to be packed with bowling balls fell on my right shoulder. That was a rotator cuff injury that took six months to heal, with lots of help from my chiro and a skillful acupuncturist I had in those days. Anyhow, my shoulder is slowly healing. I can lift my left arm a little over halfway now. The tree: my grandmother Hannah gave me my religious education; she was Orthodox and took me to shul when I stayed in Cleveland with her or with my aunt Ruth. Mother had grown up poor in the slums of Philadelphia, Pittsburg and then Cleveland and she envied the children who got to have Christmas, as if she would have received lots of presents in any case. She loved bright lights. Every year we had a tree, often waiting till the night before Christmas when the lots selling them closed down and we could go and get one free. After I left home, I never had a tree. It never occurred to me. But when my mother died, she left me a couple boxes of ornaments. When my father cremated her –against her wishes – I carried her ashes back on the plane with the ornaments and the jade necklace she also left to me. We arrived back on Christmas and chopped down a small pitch pine on our land and decorated it with the ornaments she had left me – many pre-World War II – and my costume jewelry and shells we drilled holes in. I thought of it as a memorial to her and her hard and unloving marriage and her desire for all that was pretty and glittering. Our tree is gaudy. Aside from the ornaments she left me, we have many of birds, cats, lions and tigers and every kind of animal and vegetable hanging on it. porpoises, dogs, deer, snails, cows, roosters, leopards, butterflies, fish…. It was been incredibly mild here, often hitting 60. Yesterday we had to get up at 5:45 for an early appointment with my eye doctor in West Yarmouth. Heavy fog muffled everything. Then the sun came out and I went for a walk although my vision was still smeary from the vile yellow drops they use to dilate eyes. Today is a good day to work in the garden as it is at least as warm as yesterday. We’re still getting leeks, parsnips, Swiss chard, Chinese cabbage and the scanty remnants of our fall salad greens, The last flower had dropped its petals. I used to grow fall witch hazel, but now I only have the late winter variety. I’ve given up on fall crocuses as somebody always eats them. We have many birds at the feeders, exciting and amusing the cats. Winter hasn’t even begun and already the spring seed catalogs are coming in the mail. It’s like the department stores hanging Christmas decorations the day after Halloween. A bit premature even to think about.