The Christmas Trees My Mother Planted

“No,” I said. “We are not touching one letter of it.”

“Then how will people know it’s free?”

“We’ll tell them,” Rose said. “At the gate. Every single one.”

The cider came next. My mother never wrote down most of her recipes, but she had written that one on an index card and taped it inside the cupboard door over the stove, because she made it in such big batches that she was afraid of getting the spices wrong.

Rose found it there, gone soft and brown at the corners from twenty Novembers of steam. Two gallons of fresh pressed cider from the orchard on the county road, six cinnamon sticks, a palm of whole cloves, one orange cut in rounds, and a spoon of brown sugar if the apples ran tart.

At the bottom my mother had written, Keep it hot, not boiling. Nobody likes a scorched cup.

Then there was the matter of hauling. My mother had always let people drag their own trees down to the lane on a plastic sled, and Les had met them at the bottom with the shaker. Les was not going to be there. I did not know how two girls and a nurse were going to move three hundred trees.

That was where Otis Bremer came in.

Otis has farmed the place across the road since before I was born. He is seventy-two, a dairyman who sold his herd in his sixties and kept the hay ground, and he is the kind of neighbor who shows up at a funeral with a chainsaw because he noticed your woodpile was low.

I did not ask him. I would not have known how. Rose had stopped at his place on her way home from school to ask if she could borrow a couple of sleds, and she had told him what we were doing.

Otis called me that night.

“I’ve got a tractor and a hay wagon that aren’t doing anything Saturday,” he said. “I’ll run trees down the lane for you. I’ll bring my own saw too.”

“Otis, I can’t ask you to give up your whole Saturday.”

“You didn’t ask. Your girl did. And she asked for sleds.” He cleared his throat. “Bonnie sold me the first tree she ever cut on that hill, Megan. 2017. She made me take a cup of cider before she’d let me pay. I’m not missing this one.”

Getting the word out turned out to be the easiest part, which surprised me. I am not one for computers, and the girls wanted to put it on their phones, and I let them, but I don’t believe that is what did it.

What did it was the way word moves in a county like ours. I put a notice on the board at the feed store and another at the hardware. The girls taped one in the window at the diner on the highway. I left a stack at the county health office where I work, and by Monday they were gone.

Ida, who runs the prayer chain at my mother’s church, called me on Tuesday. She did not say hello.

“Is it true you girls are giving away Bonnie’s trees?”

“It’s true.”

“For free.”

“For free. There’s a jar for the girls’ college if people want. Nobody has to.”