The Christmas Trees My Mother Planted

She mowed between the rows. She fought the deer and the weevils and one summer a drought that killed most of a block. She replanted what died. It takes seven to ten years for a Fraser fir to get to selling size, and she knew that when she started.

The first trees were ready in the fall of 2017. My mother painted a sign on a board, nailed it to a cedar post at the end of the drive, and opened the gate the Saturday after Thanksgiving.

She charged forty dollars a tree, any size, choose and cut. She lent saws. She made hot cider on a camp stove in the pole barn and gave it away in paper cups. People came from Cadillac and Lake City and Manton and as far as Traverse City.

Every dollar went into an account at the bank in town with both girls’ names on it. She would sit at that kitchen table in January with the deposit book and a pencil, and she would show the girls how much they had, row by row.

“That’s the yellow block,” she’d say. “That’s the blue. Next year the green comes in.”

Les came along in 2012. He was a widower too, a retired grader operator from the county road commission, a big quiet man who knew engines and did not know much about trees. They met at a church supper. They married the next year in my mother’s living room.

I liked him. I want to say that plainly, because it would be easy to tell this story as if he were always the man at the table with the check. He was not.

He fixed the well pump. He plowed my driveway in town without being asked. He taught both girls to drive a stick shift in his old pickup in the hay field, and he never once raised his voice when Lily stalled it on the hill eleven times in a row.

He helped my mother at the tree sale every year, mostly hauling trees to cars and running the shaker. That is the machine that spins a cut tree to shake the dead needles out. He liked the shaker. He did not like standing in the cold making conversation.

In March of last year, my mother had a stroke at the kitchen sink. She lived nine days. I was with her for most of them, because I am a nurse and because she was my mother, and Les sat in the corner of the hospital room in his coat and did not say much.

She died on a Sunday morning. Les drove home alone that afternoon and, as far as I know, did not cry in front of anybody, not at the funeral and not at the luncheon in the church basement afterward.

The farm went to him. That was how she had set it up, and it was right. It was his home. He had lived in that house with her for twelve years.

What none of us had thought about, because none of us thought she would go so soon, was the trees. There was nothing on paper about them. In my mother’s mind there did not need to be. Everybody knew what those trees were for.