Morrigan stood up, stretched, blew a loose strand of hair up away from her face, and frowned. She liked the idea of a huge, well-lit, well-decorated tree, but the string of lights was still as hopelessly tangled as it had been a half-hour ago when she had fished it out of the cardboard box.
The tree was pretty spectacular, she thought, even though it was standing there unadorned, and mocking her. Imagine! She was used to being the one doing the mocking of the naked figures in her presence.
Still, it was probably a good thing that she had agreed to let her neighbor Steve Harris talk her into a real tree. Because if this tree was artificial, she probably would have started disassembling it by now. She smiled and shook her head, though, as she remembered how he had insisted. Standing there in his red-and-gray flannel shirt and his 32-inch-waist Levi's, ax over his shoulder, tilting his head so that his cute bangs fell over one eye, inviting her to jump into the cab of his blue 1952 Chevy pick-up truck and drive out into the country to capture an eight-foot Douglas fir in the wild.
She decided to take a break from the decorating and walk down the street for a cup of coffee. A gentle snow was falling, as it had every hour for the past week, without melting or accumulating. Weird, she thought, as she watched shoppers walk briskly out of the brightly-restored storefronts, each of them a mix of Neoclassical, Georgian, Federal, Second Empire, and Queen Anne styles.
She heard the honk of a horn, and turned to see Todd Juergens, her other neighbor, his elbow on the doorframe of his bright red 1954 Ford pick-up truck. She waved as he stopped in the middle of Main Street. Cars came to a stop behind him, the drivers all smiling cheerfully as Morrigan stepped out into the street to chat.
"Hello, Todd," she said, then, "Hello, Buddy," to the black lab seated beside him in the cab of the truck.
"Miss Morrigan, how are you today?" he asked.
"I'm fine, Todd. Just struggling to get my Christmas decorations up."
