I was cleaning out the rafters in my parents’ garage last evening in preparation for a long-overdue estate sale. So there I was on a ladder, sweaty, sneezing from the dust, when I spied their artificial christmas tree. It was lurking in three sections: disassembled, but having lost none of its power to elicit memory and guilt. The memories were of the long successions of mid-December forays to rescue it for its season in the spotlight; the guilt tied to a certain essay that I wrote but could never submit.

So, you may ask, what’s the connection between the hoarded essay and the three clumps of faux-foliage in by parents’ garage? The essay centered around a set of photographs by Meg Madison that traced the trajectories of the evergreen symbols of Yuletide AFTER the presents have been opened, AFTER they have been stripped of their finery, and AFTER they have morphed from the center of attention to an object of contention vis-à-vis their disposal–a project of Meg’s I always admired. It was the timing of the written piece that contributed to the huge emotional overlays that paralyzed its release: Meg was dealing with critical health issues and coincidentally, I was dealing with the recent loss of my mother from similar issues and the slow, though immanently fatal, decline of my father.

As a result of my chance encounter in the rafters, therefore, I have resurrected the essay from its archived-file tomb (it being almost Easter, after all) and am in the process of re-reading it. I may change a couple of things, though I doubt it. It is time to let it go. So with profound apologies to Meg for a tardiness that has taken on archeological dimensions, I will be posting it here in the near future: one more unforeseen dimension of the upcoming Estate Sale.