Angie the Angel

A package arrived from my big sister Marilyn around mid-December. It contained two ornaments: an angel and a silver sparkly butterfly. Both were intended to be Christmas tree decorations, and so Angie the angel went on the tree with multi-colored lights in the living room; the butterfly, on the tree with blue lights (aka: the "Barb" tree) in the bedroom.

I wanted to show you Angie the angel, for surely that is her name, as it was the name of any angel who ever graced our tree when I was a child growing up at home. In this scene, Angie appears to be watching over us. A bit further down the tree, you can see another of my angels: sweet Dexter!

In totally unrelated news, we had another tree incident at our house overnight. An impressive ice storm moved through Pennsylvania on New Year's Day. Everything was coated in ice and it was impossible to walk on it, let alone drive. After midnight, the temperatures started to warm up and everything melted.

But just before that happened, shortly after midnight, a huge piece of tree limb (aka: a "hanger") fell and hit the house. It hit so loudly, it woke my husband, who startled to wakefulness with heart pounding. He went out with a flashlight to check it out. Somehow it never woke me, though; for once, I slept through the entire thing.

So you know what this next day brought for us: yet another round of tree removal and clean-up work. I don't have any idea why this has been happening to us, but we are averaging 2 to 3 tree falls per year here, and many of those that fall, fall ON the house. It's like a tree-magnet; I have no idea why.

Anyway, as the winds picked up, the hanger, teetering along the chimney, looked poised to take out both our phone and Internet lines, which were hanging just a few feet away. So we put our gloves and work boots on, and grabbed some saws and other implements, and went to work.

A little more than an hour's hard work found the tree limb safely removed without making anyone a widow, thank goodness. The hanger, which was as tall as the house, was laid safely onto its side by the pair of us, using a rope. It was chopped up by my husband and all of the pieces were dragged to the woods by myself. If my back, shoulders, and neck hurt now, at least I came by it honestly.

Neither of us has gone up on the roof yet to check things out there - that task remains for another day - and guess what, it's giving us icy weather again today. The good news is that the limb does not appear to have done any lasting damage, and we got a free workout out of the tree removal, once again. Our angels were watching over us, for sure!

My soundtrack song is Amy Grant's 1984 song Angels. The first comment below the video pretty much nails it: "Wow, this is the ultimate in 80s Sunday school kitsch, but way groovy!"