I just couldn’t throw away the Christmas wreaths. I knew I needed to, and each time I walked out my front door, I inhaled the lovely evergreen scent and told myself I’d do it tomorrow. Throwing them away wasn’t a simple act of just throwing them away (although I suppose it could have been). I planned to put the boughs in the yard recycling bins, but that meant clipping them from the wire framing they were attached to. So week by week passed as I breathed in the deliciousness of fresh pine and Fraser Fir as I left my house.

There were two wreaths. One, brought from my Mom’s apartment on Dec 26 (“Christmas is over; I don’t want to see any of this anymore.”) and laid on a table on the porch, and the other, mine, hanging on the wall beside my front door.

As I sat on the porch this weekend, in 90 degree weather, I noticed that even though they still smelled yummy, the wreaths weren’t looking so great. They had lost their ever-green, and were more ever-brown. As much as I hated doing so, I pulled out my garden shears and started clipping the boughs and tossing them into the yard recycling bin. First, I worked on Mom’s. Clip, toss. Clip, toss. After about 20 minutes, all that was left was a bag of clipped boughs and a metal frame.

I went to the wall to pull down my wreath. Something was strange. Why was there mulch in the wreath? I absentmindedly thought that maybe a recent storm had blown debris onto the porch. And then I noticed it!

A bird had built its nest in the hole in the wreath! That was it; I couldn’t disrupt a bird’s nest. Happily, I sat back in the swing, read my book, and hoped that one day I would see the inhabitant of the nest.