The Christmas Trees My Mother Planted

By ten o’clock there was a line of cars out the drive and onto the shoulder of the county road. By eleven it went past Otis’s mailbox. I stood at the gate in my red and black buffalo plaid coat, the same one with the yellow tape still in the pocket, and told every single car the same thing.

It’s free. One tree. Red tape. Cider’s at the table. My mother planted these.

Some people already knew. Some had heard it at church or at the feed store, or from a sister. Some were just driving by and saw the line and turned in to see what it was. Those were my favorite, because I got to watch their faces when I told them.

The hill filled up. There were families with saws and kids everywhere, little ones in snowsuits riding on their fathers’ shoulders, teenagers arguing about which tree was best, a grandmother in a lawn chair somebody had carried up the slope so she could point.

Otis ran the tractor up and down the lane all day. People would cut a tree and drag it to the end of a row, and he would come by with the hay wagon and they would heave it on, and he would run a full load down to the cars.

He did not stop for lunch. The girls brought him cider and a sandwich and he ate it at the wheel.

Around noon I went up the hill to help a young father who was trying to carry a fresh-cut spruce and a toddler at the same time. He had the tree by the trunk and the little girl by the hood of her coat, and neither was going well.

“Here,” I said. “You take her. I’ll take the top end.”

We carried that spruce down together to Otis’s wagon, which was already stacked with trees. The man was maybe thirty. He said his name, and I have forgotten it, and I am sorry for that.

“We’ve never had a real tree,” he said. “My wife’s been laid off since August. We were going to skip it this year.”

“Well,” I said. “Now you won’t.”

He put a five-dollar bill in the jar on his way past. It was folded so small it looked like a stick of gum.

That was how the jar filled. Nobody asked anybody for anything. The girls poured cider and said thank you and that was all. But people would take their cup, and look at the jar, and look at the sign at the end of the drive, and reach for their wallets.

There were fives and tens and twenties. There were ones folded into little squares. An old man in a seed cap put in a hundred dollar bill and then stood there with his hand over the jar so nobody would see what it was. Lily saw. She looked at me across the table with her mouth open.

A woman about my mother’s age came to the table with her grown son. She did not take cider. She just stood and looked at the girls for a long time, and then she said, “Which one of you is Rose?”

Rose put her hand up like she was in class.

“Your grandmother sat with my husband the last week he was alive,” the woman said. “She wasn’t a nurse. She just came and sat. Every afternoon.” She put an envelope in the jar. “I’ve been saving that for something. This is the something.”