The Day The Pines Fell

I imagined myself back home.  With my sisters.  With my brothers.  With no home to go to.

I made an offer a door down from Auntie. And waited.

It’s not exactly the hill.  With a well.  With a hedge.  With the bones of our buried.

It might could still work.  I whisper.  So’s not to jinx it.

I slept and was wakened.  The sound of a big engine.  Dad’s boom truck.  I looked for Georgie, but couldn’t see him through the dark.  The sounds were farther than the back yard, and south, toward Stark’s, toward the backhill.  I understood.  Red Ross on the road grader.  I intuitively knew that Roy was with him.  Without seeing them.  Without seeing anything through the pitch black night of the Lucerne sky.

My eyes opened to the sound of a big engine.  Not a boom truck.  Not a maintainer.  Not under a black Lucerne sky.

The timber men were here.  The Georgia pines began to fall.

The call came.

It’s ours.

Two doors down from Auntie.

I slept that night on a bed full of feathers.  I awoke on the hill.  In the chill of December:  Mom warming soup on the oil burner, Dad dragging in the Christmas tree, and Georgie not yet walking.  Mary carried me to Grandma’s house in a frozen moment.  I stood with Gram between her two mirrors.  I  saw her go on forever.

My eyes opened to a light unexpected in this mis-shapen Missouri, through a window forever shadowed by a thick wall of Georgia pine.  I stepped outside.  I walked the red ground toward the empty land where the stand had been.

I looked up and saw the bright northern sky for the first time since I’ve been here.