The Apple Tree My Neighbor Cut Down

Twice during those three weeks Chad waved at me over the fence like nothing had happened, once even calling out that I should stop by for a dip once the water heated up, as if a hot tub built on the wound of my own backyard was an invitation I could ever accept. I said nothing back either time. I had never in my life been so quiet on purpose, and it cost me something to hold it, because my instinct my whole life has been to say exactly what I’m feeling the moment I feel it. Logan would call most nights just to check that I hadn’t cracked and gone over there, and some nights I told him honestly that I’d come close, standing at my own back door with my hand on the knob, before making myself sit back down. Sharon, still recovering three hundred miles away, would text me the same four words most evenings: hold it for Founders Day. I taped that phrase to my refrigerator on a sticky note, and I looked at it more times than I could count.

Sharon came home from the hospital that same week, recovering well, and when I told her the whole story over the phone she went quiet for a second and then said, “Joyce, you tell that girl at the historical society everything, and you let her decide what to do with it. Don’t carry this by yourself.” My sister has always had better instincts than me about when to hand something to someone else.

So I called Nora Fenwick, who runs the Heritage Tree program as a volunteer alongside her regular job at the county library, and I told her what had happened. She was quiet for a long moment on the phone too.

“We still have the plaque,” she said finally. “We were planning to put it at the base of the tree itself, obviously, but there’s no reason we can’t still present it publicly at Founders Day, and there’s no reason we have to pretend the tree is still standing when we do it. I think the town should know exactly what happened to it and when.”

Founders Day in our town is not a small thing. It happens on the square in front of the old courthouse, food trucks lined up along Main, the volunteer fire department doing a pancake breakfast, the high school band playing, close to two thousand people moving through over the course of the day, which in a town our size is close to everybody who is ever going to show up to anything. The Heritage Tree unveiling was scheduled for eleven in the morning, right after the mayor’s remarks, on the courthouse steps where they’d set up a small podium and a folding table with the six bronze plaques laid out for people to see up close.