On August 9 Joanne pulled into our yard in her farm truck and did not turn off the engine. She rolled the window down and held a white envelope out of it, like she was paying at a drive-up window.
Hallie walked across the gravel to take it. She was barefoot, still in the T-shirt she slept in, and her wrists were crosshatched with the little red cuts that five weeks of Fraser fir will give you.
“That’s for the shearing,” Joanne said.
Hallie looked inside. I was on the porch with a basket of wet towels, and I watched my daughter’s face do the arithmetic before her mouth did.
“This is four hundred,” she said.
“You took the leaders too short.” Joanne kept both hands on the wheel. “Half of them will grade as seconds. That’s what seconds pay.”
Then she put the truck in reverse and backed out onto County Road B, and the dust from her tires hung over the yard for a long time after she was gone.
Get a new story in your inbox every morning.
Facebook doesn’t show you every story we post. Our free newsletter does. Join 2,500+ readers.
Hallie stood there holding the envelope. She did not cry. She turned around and looked at me across the yard, and what she said was very quiet.
“I cut them the way she showed me, Mom.”
I set the towels down. I walked out to her in my socks, across the sharp gravel, and I put my arm around her shoulders. She was taller than me that summer. I had not noticed until then.
“I know you did,” I said. “I watched you.”
Joanne Kowalski is my husband’s aunt. She is his late father’s sister, sixty-three years old, a widow, and she runs the family Christmas tree farm outside Antigo, Wisconsin. Fourteen acres of Fraser fir on sandy loam, rows running north and south, the old way.
Matt’s grandparents, Walt and Irene, planted the first rows in 1961. Walt has been gone a long time. Irene is ninety-one now and lives at Maple Ridge, the care center in town, in a room on the east side with a window that looks out over the front lawn.
In June Joanne sat at our kitchen table with a cup of coffee and asked if Hallie wanted a summer job. Her regular shearing help had moved to Wausau. Duane, her hired man of twenty years, had a bad shoulder and could not swing a knife all day anymore.
“Seventy-five cents a tree,” Joanne said. “There’s four thousand that need doing this year. That’s three thousand dollars for a summer, Hallie. That’s a car.”
Hallie was sixteen and had been saving for a car since she was twelve. She looked at me, and I looked at Matt, and Matt shrugged in the way that means it is her decision.
“I’ll do it,” Hallie said.
Joanne put out her hand across the table, and Hallie shook it. I remember thinking it was the first real handshake of my daughter’s life. Joanne had a firm grip and dry farm hands, and she smiled when she let go.
If you have never sheared Christmas trees, here is what it is. Every summer, while the new growth is still soft, somebody walks every row with a long knife and cuts each tree into the shape a family will want in their living room.
The knife has a blade a little over a foot long, thin and sharp as a razor, and you swing it in long downward strokes around the tree. You wear shin guards because the knife comes down past your legs on every stroke. You wear leather gloves because the sap glues everything.