Page 13 of Christmas Trees & Weak Knees

“It would be so much fun,” she continues, apparently oblivious to my discomfort.

Lorna might have witnessed my one and only attempt at busking when I was eight, but she wasn’t in the audience this past spring, when I crashed and burned onstage at eighteen. I have zero desire to put myself back in the spotlight ever again. Especially not now that I’ve settled into the quieter, safer Christmas tree farm kind of life.

I peer out the window at the gently sloping, tree-studded hills that surround our farmhouse. The breeze sends fading maple leaves swirling across the ground. I have everything I need here, in my own little hideaway at Hidden Acres.

Lorna wraps me in a tight hug, her signature floral scent surrounding us in a comforting cloud, and squeezes me extra close for good measure. “Stay sweet, sugar,” she says, squashing all the air out of me. An air-kiss dusts my cheek.

Before I can even catch my breath to reply, Lorna’s bounding out the door in bedazzled Keds. The storm door creaks shut behind her, and I watch through the screen as she hoists herself into Dave’s old Chevy pickup. The engine rumbles a deep bass, and then they’re bumping down the potholed dirt driveway on their way back to Nashville.

When their taillights disappear behind a thicket of American arborvitae at the bend in the road, I inhale deeply and breathe out a sigh of relief. While I’m always sad to see the Meades go, I savor the rare quiet moment. It’s the calm before the Christmas storm, with only a few weeks left before the tree lot opens for the season.

Between planting seedlings, shaping trees, and monitoring for pests and disease, there’s always something happening on the farm. Things ramp up considerably in the weeks before Christmas. There’s still plenty of prep work to do, but now that the last reservation for the Hideaway is over for the year, I can have the studio to myself. No one needs to know I’m working on anything.

The bright lights of Nashville might be meant for Lorna. But it turns out, anonymity is my jam.

Hidden Acres is many things:

A homestead.

A Christmas tree farm.

A reindeer rescue.

And, for the past few months, my refuge.

I’ve spent most of my free time holed up in the barn loft or the Hideaway. Writing music for myself. Recording instrumental jingles for local businesses. These are the things that fit perfectly into my comfort zone. Who needs center stage when you can be front and center with an old Neotek Elan 28 inline studio console or a digital audio workstation?

And here, in the Hideaway’s recording studio, I can do exactly that—hide away. I slide on the studio monitor headphones, plug in my guitar, and lose myself in the music that’s just for me. Behind thick, padded walls, I don’t need to perform or be perfect. I can just be.

I’ve definitely needed the quiet solitude of the Hideaway. After strumming “Happy Birthday” for Karl at Halley’s insistence, it was impossible to resist the siren song of my guitar. I’ve found comfort in the soft acoustic reverberations. Still, my lyric notebook sits on the corner of my desk, taunting me whenever I look at it. And when I do, the spiral of doubt builds inside me until it hurts to breathe.

But even so, I couldn’t keep the melodies at bay. They crept up on me when I was trimming trees, gliding over the snip-snip-snip of the pruners until I found myself humming along. They filtered in on the breeze that rattled the tree branches and whispered through the field grass, sending my fingers tapping a beat on my thigh as I hiked up to the ridge to survey the groves. They echoed along with the cool autumn rain pattering against the farmhouse’s metal roof, dripping with syncopated lyrics that begged to be written.

As I was swatting at mosquitos a few weeks ago while checking trees for aphids, a new jingle for the tree farm came to me.

Hidden Acres Christmas trees are sure to be…

The very best trees in Tennessee.

Sure, it’s not big or splashy, but it’s something.

Something I’ve been desperately trying to ignore.

But earworms, like pesky tree-killing bagworms, are persistent little buggers. I read somewhere that the most tenacious earworms can last up to a year.

I believe it.

And I just know this earworm won’t let me go until I write and record it, even if the last thing I want to do is put myself back in front of a microphone again…audience or no audience.

I’ve put it off as long as possible, but I can’t do it anymore. Grudgingly, I tap out the jingle on the Yamaha portable digital grand piano just to get a little peace and quiet.

It starts small, with that jingle.

But the peace and quiet don’t last.

Twenty acres of tree farm and even that’s not enough space for me to hide from the melodies and harmonies that continuously pop up, so insistent that I pay attention. Just like I have no control over my dimples or slight widow’s peak, writing music seems to be in my DNA.

Today’s recording session’s been productive. I’ve managed to get most of the percussion finished, so the only thing left to do is record a jingle bell track. I reach for an old sleigh bell strap from the hook in the instrument storage cabinet. The tooled leather’s worn from years of use. The metal is dull and dented, but the sound is bright and cheery, conjuring up visions of the season’s first fluffy snowflakes and jolly old Saint Nick driving his sleigh.