The Christmas Trees My Mother Planted

So I didn’t. I went out the back door and walked up the east hill and stood among the stumps.

My mother used to tie a strip of colored flagging tape on each tree the year it reached selling height. Yellow for the 2009 rows. Blue for 2010. She did it so she could tell at a glance, from the cider table, which block was ready.

There were bits of yellow and blue tape lying all over the ground where the crew had cut them loose and dropped them. I picked up a piece of the yellow and put it in my coat pocket. I don’t know why. It is still in that coat.

I counted the stumps in one row and multiplied, because that is the kind of person I am when I am too upset to feel anything. Les had told the truth. It was about four hundred.

Then I walked over the crest to the back hill, where the later plantings were. The crew had been through there too, but they had been picky. They had taken only the straight ones, the full ones, the ones that would sell on a city lot.

What was left was what my mother would have called the honest trees. Some short. Some with a flat side where the wind came across the field. Some with a double top. A good number that were perfectly fine and just a year or two shy of tall.

I walked every row with my hands in my pockets and counted. Three hundred and six.

Down at the house, I saw Les come out onto the porch and stand there with his arms folded, looking up at me. He didn’t wave. After a while he went back inside.

I drove home without winterizing anything.

My mother’s name was Bonnie Pratt. Before that it was Bonnie Hale, which was my father’s name and mine, until I married and became a Sturgis and then, after the divorce, decided to stay one so the girls and I would match.

My father, Wendell, died of a heart attack in 2006, splitting wood behind that same pole barn. He was fifty-eight. My mother found him. She kept the farm, all sixty acres of sandy hill ground north of Cadillac, and she kept it alone for six years.

The spring of 2009, my twins were born in March, three weeks early and small enough to fit in one of her bread pans. Lily came first and Rose eleven minutes later, and my mother held one in each arm in the hospital and said she was going to plant them a college.

I thought she was talking the way grandmothers talk. She was not.

That April she ordered two hundred and fifty Fraser fir seedlings from a nursery downstate and planted every one of them herself, on her knees, with a dibble bar and a five-gallon bucket of water. She was fifty-one years old. She did it again the next spring, and the next.

By the time she stopped, in 2016, she had put two thousand trees in the ground on that farm. Fraser fir mostly, because that is what people up here want, with some blue spruce and a few rows of Scotch pine for the old-timers who like the smell.

Anybody who has grown Christmas trees will tell you they do not grow themselves. Every July my mother went out with her long shearing knife and shaped every tree on the place by hand, so they would come up full and cone shaped instead of tall and gangly.