From How The Bubble Tree Came To Me (12.14.23)

Sometime in the holiday season of 1952 or 1953, I think, my aunt Jane was hurrying through the main floor of the State Street Marshall Field’s in Chicago. In those days, and for decades, the main floor of Field’s was a city block square, three stories tall, and studded with enormous columns that probably actually did hold up the nine retail floors above. Around the giant pillars and their overscale capitals were fabulous holiday decorations, on a scale to suit the setting. Gigantic round-bellied snowmen leaning outward, and shiny Christmas balls two feet in diameter, hung with wide red ribbons and enormous bows. On the marble floor were aisle after aisle of shining cases with the best of goods arrayed for Chicagoans, and well-dressed decorous saleswomen saying, “May I wrap this for you, madam?” as people bustled by. Oh, it was a palace.

My aunt was thirty-five then, a petite and energetic woman, properly gloved and hatted and wrapped in a winter coat. She carried a pocketbook and, for some reason, on this particular December afternoon, she also carried little me, her namesake, called Peggy Jane. I suppose I was properly gloved and hatted, too, and decorous, looking up at the decorations with that small-child serenity, hearing the city chatter around us, headed for the train to go home. I was a biddable child, I think, and it must have been quite a shock to Jane when I leaned and reached for the Bubble Tree.

“You nearly tipped me over! And when I stopped, you were looking and looking at something on one of the counters, all lit up. It was a bubble tree, all lit and bright, and you wanted it so much. You fell in love with it, I think.”

I think I did, and perhaps it was the first fall after milk and mother. The impulse to lean toward something has lasted; I have, ever since, had the capacity to be suddenly caught and held. I have fallen in love regularly and permanently, with the shape of horses, with flat golden afternoon light, with the charged alchemy of the rehearsal room, with the faces of my children, with the intersection of words. And on that day it was a little tabletop tree, electrified, and, on the tip of every branch, lights bicolored and glass-tubed, each one bubbling hard toward its tip. It was marked $16.47.

Now, let me be clear. My aunt was a frugal woman, trained in a hard school of frugality. My grandparents’ home, and hers, was modest and mostly hand-built. Everything was used and reused, and Jane was well established in a lifelong scrounging habit—no pile of furniture marked “free” ever went unexamined. The clothes she was wearing that day in Field’s are probably still hanging in her dark closet. The war had brought the country out of the Great Depression, and it was early in the prosperous fifties, but that family had embraced skimping and saving as their way of life.

But we were having a Special Day, and, she says, my eyes were large and round and filled with light. Janie stopped at the counter and bought the bubble tree in its big box and lugged it home on the train, and later that night, her mother set it on the tea cart against the bay window and we all watched it light up and begin to bubble, its image doubled by the storm window and magnified by the many little curving panes. Outside, the snow fell, I suppose, and it was cold. Inside, I sat with my grandparents and my namesake aunt and watched the bright bubbling begin.

I have it now. It came to me sometime in the 1980s, when I was living in a settled house at last and had settled work, and it must have looked as if my young wandering days were over. Unbelievably, I brought it home on an airplane—was I out of my mind?—in its own original storage box, still marked Marshall Field and Company, on which I scribbled in large red letters “fragile” and “up” with many demonstrating arrows. It has been the signature event of my own holidays for thirty-five years, and the start of a bubble forest of sorts, as my husband and I would run across other trees in shabby antique stores. One season, after realizing, with a start, that there would come a day when all the bulbs we had would have burned out and then the bubble tree era would end, we started a deliberate search for the old small-based bulbs. Now, I shudder to report, we have several hundred bulbs, and most of them work. We save the others just in case. The bubble tree era extends into our children’s futures, and perhaps their children’s.

We don’t have a bay window in this house, but at holiday time, we put all the leaves in our dining room table and run it right up against the windows, crowding the trees up against the pane. An extended period, sometimes a week or two, of delicate adjustment follows, as the bulbs are tested and settled and the old cloth-covered electrical cords run to the outlets. We moan a little, seeing that some “needles” are dropping, never to return. We chase off the damned cat, who as a kitten thought the needles strangely delicious. And then one Minnesota night, perhaps with icicles outside the window, and some years with heavy frost on the pane, when we’re all home together, we light the bubble trees one by one against the dark. We struggle with the ancient frayed cords and the sockets where connection is prevented by bits of viscose. We agree that the oldest bulbs work best and that the family tree is the most important. We test, and test again, to find which is the failed bulb that prevents a tree from lighting, and eventually we settle for what we can. The bubble forest has upward movement and color, doubled by reflection and multiplied by memory. In the dark outside the pane, behind my own face and in what would be the stars over the trees, I think I glimpse my mother, my brothers and sister, and my aunt, eyes cast down as she moves toward the kitchen.

Christmas!