Sixty Wreaths on the Hill

The garage was swept. That is the first thing I noticed when I pulled up to Josh and Kaylee’s place that Thursday afternoon.

The cement floor was swept clean right to the drain.

The far corner was empty. For fifteen Decembers that corner had held my wreaths, sixty cedar wreaths with red velvet bows, stacked six high on old feed sacks under a canvas tarp.

They were waiting there in the cold for Wreaths Across America Saturday, the same as every year.

I had made them the first week of December and carried them over myself, two armloads at a time.

I stood in the open door with my keys still in my hand. I looked at the clean square of floor where they had been, and I could still smell the cedar hanging in the air.

Kaylee came out the back door of the house with the baby on her hip. He was two, our youngest grandson, and his nose was red and running.

She was wiping it with the corner of a dish towel. She saw me standing in her garage and she knew why I was there before I opened my mouth.

“Oh, those,” she said, before I asked a thing. “I hauled them to the brush pile at the county site on Tuesday.”

“The whole garage smelled like a Christmas tree lot,” she said, “and he would not stop sneezing. Two days of it. I couldn’t stand it anymore.”

“Kaylee,” I said, “those were for the cemetery.” I said it quietly, because I did not trust my voice to do anything else, and because the baby was looking right at me.

She shifted him to her other hip and gave a little shrug. It was the kind of shrug you give when somebody asks if you have seen their reading glasses.

“I figured they were yours,” she said. “I figured you had more. You always have more of everything.” Then she went back in the house and shut the door.

I want to tell this right, so I will say it now. It was her garage.

Josh and Kaylee bought that place from Dwain and his brothers in the summer, after Dwain’s mother passed.

It was theirs fair and square. For fifteen years before that, the garage had been Grandma Engen’s, and she kept my wreaths for me every December like it was the most natural thing in the world.

I had told Josh in November that the wreaths would go in the garage again.

Same corner, same as always. He said, “Sure, Mom,” the way a son does with his mind on something else.

Josh drives propane for the co-op. In December he is out twelve hours a day, because December is when the tanks on every farm for thirty miles run low at once.

A man who forgets to tell his wife about some wreaths is not a bad man.

He is a tired one. I have been married to one of those for thirty-four years.

But Kaylee knew they were mine. She said so herself. She did not know what they were for, and she did not ask.

She did not call me, and my number is on her refrigerator. She loaded sixty wreaths into the bed of Josh’s pickup by herself.

She drove them eleven miles to the county brush site and threw them on the pile with the storm limbs and the cut lilacs.

Then she came home and swept the floor.