The Christmas My Street Trimmed My Tree

I sat at the end of my own driveway on the fourteenth of December with the heater running and the church bulletin still folded in my coat pocket, and I counted the cars on Orchard Lane.

There were fourteen. They were parked down both sides of a dead-end street that holds eleven houses, nose to tail, all the way up to my mailbox. I knew eight of them. Marv Schaller’s blue pickup. The Reinkes’ gray minivan. Delmar Kittleson’s flatbed trailer with the ladders still strapped on. And a Grant County Highway Department truck with its orange light turned off, the same kind of truck I had watched back out of this driveway at four in the morning for thirty-one years.

I did not know the other six.

The drapes in my front window were open. I had not opened those drapes since the ninth of September. I had pinned them shut with a clothespin so no daylight would cross the carpet and make the room look like a place where somebody lived.

To tell it right, I have to start with Lee, and with the ninth of September. If you only hear about the afternoon, you will think this is a story about a surprise. It is really about a woman who had decided to be finished, and a street that would not let her.

Leland

My husband was Leland Hegge, and nobody ever called him that except the church directory. He was Lee. He was a big, slow-moving, quiet man with hands like two coal shovels, and he drove a plow truck for Grant County for thirty-one years.

I was the secretary at the elementary school for thirty-four. In a town the size of Platteville, that means half the grown parents on my street have stood at my desk holding a note from home. Ty Reinke, who lives across from me now with a wife and two children, sat on the bench outside the principal’s office in 1999 for hitting a boy over a trading card. I gave him a peppermint. He remembers the peppermint. I’d forgotten the boy.

We were married on the fourteenth of June in 1975, in the same Lutheran church where I would later sit through his funeral. We bought the house on Orchard Lane in 1979, a white foursquare built in 1928, with a porch that sags a little to the left and one big front window with a deep sill. The ceilings in the front room are eight feet. Hold on to that number.

Lee did not take money for anything. That was his one stubborn rule, and it drove me crazy for years. If you tried to pay him, he looked at you as if you had spoken in another language, and then you got a loaf of bread or a pie pressed on you for the trouble, because that was how you made him take anything at all.

In the winter he came home at dawn off the county routes, ate two eggs standing up, and went back out in his own pickup with a blade he had bolted on himself. He did the lanes the county does not touch. Six old people’s driveways. A farm lane out past Lancaster that belonged to a tree grower named Gil Hollenbeck. Twenty-two winters, Lee did Gil’s lane, and I never once saw Gil pay him a dime.

I used to say, “You are going to plow yourself right into the ground.”

He’d say, “Somebody’s got to, Dot.”

He was seventy-eight on the ninth of September. We had been married fifty years and three months. At our party in the church hall in June, Lee stood up in his brown suit and said, “I’d like to thank my wife for putting up with the plow.” Then he sat down. That was his whole speech.

On the ninth, a Tuesday, he went out to the garden after breakfast to pull the last of the carrots. He sat down on an upturned bucket to do it, because of his knees. I brought his coffee out at ten.

He still had one hand in the dirt. His cap was tipped forward like a man thinking something over.

The doctor said it was his heart and that it would have been very fast. I have decided to believe the doctor.