The Row With His Name On It
Kurt’s truck came around the windbreak at twenty minutes to nine. It was the same gray Silverado with the dented tailgate that had pulled into our yard every Sunday for twenty years, and I knew the sound of it before I saw it.
I was sitting on a stool at the card table by the barn door. The gray metal cash box was in front of me, and Erik’s bow saw was across my knees.
I had on Erik’s red and black barn coat. It came down to the middle of my thighs, and the sleeves hung past my fingers no matter how many times I pushed them up.
Hannah stood beside me with the roll of yellow tags. Ben was out by the shaker, pretending to check the belt the way his dad had shown him. Neither of them said a word when the truck came into view.
Kurt saw me and stopped. Right there in the middle of the lane, maybe sixty yards out, with the engine running and the exhaust hanging white in the cold November air.
He did not pull forward and he did not back up. He just sat behind the wheel and looked at me, and I looked back at him, and for a long time nobody on that farm moved at all.
I want to tell you how we got to that morning. I did not wake up one day angry. I got there slowly, the way you get anywhere in a year like the one we had.
Seventeen Springs
Erik and I bought the twenty acres in the fall of 2008. It was bare ground south of Marshfield, an old hayfield gone to quack grass, with a pole barn that leaned a little to the east.
We never lived out there. We had our house in town, close to the hospital where I work in the lab. The farm was eleven miles out on a county road, and it was ours the way a dream is yours.
In April of 2009 we planted the first five hundred Fraser firs. They came as transplants in bundles wrapped in wet burlap, and we put every one of them in by hand with planting bars.
Erik’s brother Kurt came out that first weekend. He was not much for farming, but he was strong and he did not complain, and he dug more holes than either of us that Saturday.
I remember the three of us sitting on the tailgate at dusk, eating cold chicken out of a bucket. My hands were raw and my back was a knot. Erik looked out at those little trees, no taller than his boot, and said they would be Christmas trees someday.
Kurt laughed at him. “Someday when you’re old,” he said.
“Then I’ll be old with a tree farm,” Erik said.
We planted five hundred every April after that. Seventeen springs in a row, from 2009 through 2025. Eight thousand five hundred trees, give or take the ones the deer got and the ones that drowned in the wet spring of 2013.
Our first real season was 2017. Erik made the sign himself, routered into a cedar plank: Thorson Family Trees, Cut Your Own. He hung it on two chains from the gate post.
He set the price that first year at a flat rate. Any tree, any size, one price. He said people should not have to do math in the cold with their kids pulling on their sleeves.
That price went up a few times over the years, with fuel and seedlings and netting. By last season it was sixty-five dollars, saw and sled and shaking and baling included. Erik thought that was fair, and so did the families who came back every year.