The Oak Across Mom’s Lane

The Card on the Refrigerator

So that brings me back to that Sunday afternoon, the twelfth day, standing in Mom’s kitchen with the reminder card in front of my face.

Mom has a heart that has been worrying her doctors for two years.

She had a valve problem and a little fluid that comes and goes, and the heart doctor in Columbia had changed her water pill the month before and wanted to see her in person.

“They already moved it once,” Mom said, reading my face. “I don’t want to call and move it again. They’ll put me out to August.”

“You’re not moving it,” I said.

The thing I kept thinking about was not the doctor. It was what would happen if her heart acted up some night and she had to call 911.

The ambulance would have to stop at the county road, and two medics would have to carry my mother a quarter mile on a cot and lift her over a four-foot trunk.

You can wait on your brother for a lot of things. You cannot wait on him for that.

“Mom,” I said, “I’m going to cut it.”

She set down the dish towel. “Joann, you can’t cut that tree.”

“I can run a saw. Dad taught me before he taught Dwight. You remember.”

“That’s not what I mean.” She sat down at the table, slowly, the way she sits now.

“Dwight said he’d do it. If you go cut it after I paid him, it’ll shame him. In front of everybody.”

That was the real reason she had waited twelve days with her car trapped and her doctor card on the refrigerator. Not the money. She did not want her son embarrassed.

I sat down across from her. “Mom, I’m not doing it to shame him. I’m doing it so you can get to Columbia on Thursday. That’s all.”

She looked at me for a long time. Then she looked out the window at the root plate, standing up red against the green pasture.

“Your daddy proposed to me under that tree,” she said. “Did you know that? August of 1966. He was so nervous he dropped the ring in the acorns, and we were on our hands and knees for ten minutes.”

I did not know that. In 47 years, I had never heard that story.

“Well,” she said, and wiped her eyes with the back of her wrist, “I guess if somebody’s got to cut it up, it ought to be one of his.”