UNCLE JOE’S CHRISTMAS TREES

(The following is an excerpt from my memoir, still in progress. It falls into the portion about the most memorable people of my life—a  section that is proving to be much longer than I had anticipated.)

Uncle Joe was a man of few words. When my aunt died, he would frequently come to our house and sit in the living room and just be—to use a spiritual description of his presence. Every now and then he would say something which caught us off guard and probably made us pay more attention than if he were a man of many words. I don’t think that was an intentional strategy on his part, it was just simply who he was.

 

He was a welder by trade and no doubt a good one. He and my Aunt Almyra (aka Aunt Maurie) lived in the family homestead on Branch Street, in which my father and my Uncle Ernie had also lived during their growing up years, along with my grandparents of course. The sibling lineup was: Aunt Maurie was the oldest, my father was next, then Uncle Ernie.

 

Uncle Joe had a couple of beehives from which he showed me how to extract the honey. I watched him with wonderment as he pulled the trays out of the hives, not wearing any protective equipment, bees landing on his bare arms and buzzing around his head. If he got stung, he never let on—again, a man of few words.

 

I guess he has come to mind recently because Christmas is on the horizon and our Christmas trees always came from his property in the Pine Barrens. They were long-needle white pines, one of the most fragrant and sweetest-smelling of all the trees in the forest. 

On the established day, we would get into our ‘46 two-tone green Plymouth and go into the woods to pick out the perfect tree for that particular Christmas. It would be in the center of the platform around which my Lionel trains ran through a little Plasticville village,which included a service station, hospital, a train station, a few houses, a post office, police station, a few other things—all to my great delight.

I suppose I could say that the sweet-smelling needles of Uncle Joe’s Christmas trees were like being vaccinated with true Christmas joy and wonder.