Of car dens and tree jewellery...

The trees started glinting – catching the sun and throwing it back at me. I looked up to see what was causing it and saw a pile of stuff. Got up and walked towards it – jumped up to knock it down. A load of my belongings fell at my feet – an old pink paisley eiderdown that had been my gran’s, a pile of necklaces and a picture my little brother had drawn me of our old house. The Spanish moss brushed it towards me – hung as if mimicking the willow trees I loved so much, weeping. I crouched down and gathered it all together. Picked it up and walked back towards the car.
I took the eiderdown in first. Pushed its soft quilting into all the crevices in the back seat. Made a nest. That’s what it felt like I was doing – nesting. I curled in a ball on my side to test it out. Started to drift sleepily so I knew it was okay. Then I sat up and poured the bag of jewellery out in front of me. Sifted through my old necklaces and shiny baubles I’d collected like a magpie since small. I leant out the unhinged rusting door and hung some green glass beads from a branch. They caught the sun and glinted just as pretty as any emerald would be. Like precious eyes they reflected all that sparked around them - twisted softly in light breezes.
I strung them all up then. Draped them haphazardly in clusters drooping down like metal beginning to melt. The whole tree sparkled, weighted in glass and metal. It was not that easy to tell what it looked like from the outside though – the sun might catch them glinting in a certain way, but this was my den – it was inside where it really shone. Necklaces hung like coloured icicles around the roof. If I sat up too quickly they caught in my hair – clinked together like drinks at parties or children’s xylophones.

(From my novel "Farewell for you are changing")