Knot a Pretty Picture

It's not a pretty picture around here lately. The house is an absolute mess, with a package of From and To tags mixed in with the clean laundry and a strew of half-addressed Christmas cards sharing the kitchen counter with a couple of houseplants I had to practically put IV's into they got so thirsty this last week.Time was at this season, we put a candle in every window and that was fine for all the years the kids were here because kids you can order around: “Go light the candles! Go turn the candles off!” But these last few years I find I will do almost anything to avoid dealing with window candles and so, to compensate, I have been slowly collecting a number of wreaths and small-scale Christmas trees all, need I say, fake, which when set in place twinkle away, and hopefully give the neighbors the sense that the Marottas really do care about such things even though they’re almost always AWAY on Halloween and they never EVER adorn their front door with a nice wide garden hat sprouting pastel blossoms come spring.Make a long story short it was the wreaths that were getting to me yesterday; I knew if I didn’t get them hung in a handful of key windows they wouldn’t get up until December 24^th. I have that much to do over the next ten nights …I had a young guy here yesterday, kicking the holy hell out of my stupid laptop which turns out to be the real culprit in last week’s Case of the Mysterious Despairing Address-book on my phone.  (Click here for that tale of woe.) Nick knows just what to do and was quietly doing it for three long hours, and somewhere in there I remembered that he is both an Eagle Scout and a certified wilderness survivor.I asked him about my knots.I was trying to use fishing wire to hang my wreaths but the knots just kept slipping such that they looked like slow motion yo-yos moving down and down the windows 'til I could come and yank them up again and then boom the same thing over and over. So he taught me how to tie the kind of knot cowboys use and just like that the wreaths stayed up. He even stabbed the various elements of my two fake trees together and they're both twinkling away now, one on the porch and one here in my office, the only still-tidy room in the house… And you know I've been thinking as I write this: Maybe I can just stay in here for the next two weeks and have the Domino’s guy come by now and then and sail a pizza up to me Frisbee-style.

the one clean room