The Christmas Trees My Mother Planted

That was the whole conversation. I said thank you, and I meant it, and I left him there.

Three days later Rose came home from school with a plan written on two sheets of notebook paper.

We would not sell the trees. That was the first line, and she had underlined it twice. We would give them away, one per family, free, any family that came. We would make Grandma’s cider. We would put out a jar.

“Not a price,” Rose said. “Just a jar. For the fund. If people want to.”

“What if nobody puts anything in it?” Lily said.

“Then three hundred families get a Christmas tree from Grandma,” Rose said. “And that’s still what she’d want.”

I read the two pages twice at the kitchen counter. I have watched a good many doctors explain a good many plans in my life, and I have rarely seen one as clean as what my sixteen-year-old had written in purple gel pen.

“Okay,” I said. “Okay. Let’s do it.”

We had about three weeks. I work four ten-hour shifts a week for the county, mostly home visits, and I traded two of them to get the Wednesday before Thanksgiving and the Friday after it off. The Saturday was already mine.

The first thing we needed was the sign.

The girls and I drove out to the farm the Sunday before Thanksgiving, a bright cold day with a skiff of snow on the fields. Les’s truck was gone. He had left the pole barn unlocked, which I took as its own kind of permission.

The sign was where my mother had always kept it in the off-season, leaning behind the workbench next to her shearing knives and the coffee cans of flagging tape. Lily found it. She pulled it out into the light and then just stood there holding it.

It was a slab of white pine about four feet long, painted cream, with green letters my mother had done herself with a little brush. She had touched it up every fall. You could see where the newer paint sat over the old in places.

Across the top, in her round careful hand, it said Pratt Family Trees, Choose and Cut.

Under that, in smaller letters, it said Any Tree $40. Cider Is On Me.

And at the bottom, in letters so small you had to stand close to read them, it said Every tree on this hill is for Lily and Rose. Thank you for helping them grow.

I had seen that sign every November for eight years. I had never once read the bottom line. I don’t think I had ever stood close enough.

Lily read it out loud, and her voice went at “grow.”

Rose took her mittens off and put her bare fingers on the letters of her own name, very lightly, the way you touch something that might still be wet. She traced the R. Then the O. Then she put her mittens back on and turned away so we wouldn’t see her face.

I stood there in the doorway of my mother’s pole barn with my arms around both my girls and the sign leaning against my hip. We stayed like that for a while. The barn smelled like oil and cold and old sawdust.

“We’re not painting over the price,” Lily said finally, wiping her nose on her sleeve.