Which reminds me. Last year—the first year Daniel and I were living apart before we actually filed for divorce—the nice man at the Christmas tree lot near the Arboretum sold me a tree with—I love this—a double trunk.

A double trunk.

That tree had to have weighed ninety pounds at least. Maybe a hundred. Getting it home and into a stand was unreal. (Horrible.) I’ve learned my lesson. I will feel every tree up and down before I let the guy with the chainsaw buzz inches off the bottom, making a tree officially mine.

Now it’s a year later, and here I am again with my children shopping for a tree, albeit at a different tree lot. And my mood’s low, I admit. December’s the hardest month in the year for me being single—not because I need a man, but because all family traditions I worked so hard to create now bite me. But today is going to be fun. I swear. We’re going to have fun right now.

Right now, I insist silently, jamming my hands deeper into my trench coat pockets, shoulders hunched to ward off the December Seattle rain.

I’m trying hard not to let the rain get to me. Contrary to popular opinion, it doesn’t rain every day in Seattle, and I seriously doubt we have the highest suicide rate in the country. That’s absurd. Sleepless in Seattle was set here. This isn’t a depressing place. In fact, we here in the Pacific Northwest blithely refer to our wet weather patterns as drizzle, mist, droplets, light showers, scattered clouds, scattered rain, afternoon clearing, and reported sunspots.

How is that depressing?

But I will tell you I’m less than thrilled to be shopping for a tree right now. The rain isn’t exactly pelting us, but it’s got a nice clipped tempo, and it’s cold out, and the lot is muddy and the trees are wet and the kids are now wet and I just want to go home.

But I promised them (Mom, a promise is a promise), and they came home from school excited, so here we are.

“How about this one, Mom?” William shouts from a thicket of green that easily tops ten or eleven feet.

“That’s a beautiful tree,” the guy from the lot says, baseball cap pulled low on his forehead, hiding his face and sparse ponytail.

“It’s got to be ten feet,” I say, trying to keep the exasperation from my voice. How does he think I’m going to pack and carry a ten-foot tree on my midsize SUV?

“It’s twelve, ma’am. And a really nice tree. You won’t see many that pretty.”

I shoot him a long look. I’m an interior designer. Ceiling heights are my thing. “My ceilings are barely eight feet.”

“We can always take something off at the bottom.”