is_it_in ovenbird At noon my friend called. I heard her frazzled voice on speaker phone. She said one word: “help.” Then she told me that she finally bought a Christmas tree but dementia was turning the whole ordeal of putting it up into a nightmare. Her husband can't see to hold the tree straight, he can't tighten the screws on the tree base. It's a two person job and she's only one person–an overwhelmed, exhausted, perimenopausal person suffering from anxiety and hot flashes with a husband with a brain that can no longer do any spatial processing. I was working but I said I'd come over anyway. This is the advantage of living in the same townhouse complex as one of your closest friends. When I opened her front door it looked like a pine tree exorcism had taken place. The entryway was covered in needles. The stairs were covered in needles. The living room was covered in needles. I patted myself on the back for deciding to buy an artificial tree five years ago. I found my friend underneath her Christmas tree, which was listing dangerously to the side in its red aluminum stand. “I'm going to have a nervous breakdown,” she said. I dove right in and tried to help. I held the tree while she tightened the screws, but it wouldn’t stand up. I got down on the floor and crawled under the tree. Needles rained down into my hair. A needle got in my eye. I tried to tighten the screws but I realized that the bottom branches needed trimming in order to expose enough of the trunk to support the tree in its stand. “They offered to do that at the garden center,” my friend said, “but it was five minutes to closing and I felt bad for the girl working there and I didn't want to ask her to do it.” This is such a typical woman thing to do. We don't want to inconvenience anyone, even if it means our own lives are hell later. My friend went to get a saw while I held the tree upright. I tried to saw off the offending branches but the saw was dull and ineffective. Sawdust joined the carpet of needles on the floor. Frank Sinatra was singing jingle bells in the background. My friend tried again to jam the tree into the stand even though I wasn't done chopping branches. “Is it in?!” she yelled. “Is it in NOW?” I said something ridiculous about how you've got a problem if you can't tell and then something about the whole scene caused me to crack up: Frank Sinatra, my friend dropping F-bombs every other word, the repeated shouting about whether “it was in.” I started laughing and I couldn't stop and she started laughing and said “Merry fucking Christmas” and I said I had to go back to work even though the tree still wasn't standing but I promised to come back later and as I descended the stairs that now looked like the floor of a pine forest I thought about everything we carry, those of us who are caregivers for children and aging parents and terminally ill spouses. I thought about how heavy the load is and how hard joy is to find and I thought about how lucky I am to have a friend to laugh with when you're covered in sap and a tree is falling on your head. A lot of things are total shit, but she is a light, even in her own darkness. I thought, these are the things we remember. Not the perfect moments but the dramatically imperfect ones, the ones where we laugh, because at least we're in this shit storm together, and the absurdity demands either laughter or tears. Merry fucking Christmas. I give you all permission to buy a fake tree. 251211 what's it to you? who go blather from