Harvest is over. Flower beds have been cleared of dead blooms and frost-bitten foliage. Garden rakes and hoes have been cleaned and stored away until spring. The wood thrush left for winter camp weeks ago, and the forest lies quiet. Shades of gray and brown dominate the landscape patched with green pine and hemlock. I'm eager to rest. Summer's clamor and clutter and my mother's illness have worn me out. I'm ready to watch snowflakes drift from the sky while I sip tea and my flagging spirit recovers.
Lately, whenever grief squeezes my heart, I stroll the woodland trail behind my home and remember our family farm in summer: chickens scratching for beetles underfoot, pigs snuffling in stinking swill, lowing cows at milking time, and fireflies blinking in the dark. Most of all, I remember Lucy’s leafy embrace.
As a child growing up in rural Maine during the sixties, my favorite hideaway was an old apple tree I named Lucy after my favorite actress, Lucille Ball. Lucy stood alone in the middle of a pasture beyond our cow barn and chicken coop. I visited her at least once every day. Holstein cows kept her company while I attended the local elementary school, fed calves in the barn, or washed dishes for my mother.
Though I tried several times, my small arms couldn’t stretch wide enough to encompass Lucy’s wide waist. However, it didn’t matter because she still felt like the shape of my mother’s hips when I hugged her. My father seldom pruned Lucy, and she had large knotty roots for feet. I often stood tippy-toed on them to reach her lowest limb and then hoisted myself up onto her lap: a wide notch where her trunk separated into three large limbs, extending into smaller branches spreading finger-like toward the sky. Her rough bark scratched my hands, but I didn’t care. Her apples tasted wormy and sour, but I loved Lucy anyway. She couldn’t notice my messy pigtails or dirty hands and order me to get cleaned-up because company was coming. I remained on Lucy’s lap and played with the crusty lichen covering her like an old housedress until my mother called me in for supper.
Perched against Lucy’s limbs during long summer vacations free of teachers and rules, I observed the comings and goings of the veterinarian driving his dusty blue pickup, the milk inspector in his more sedate sedan, and the shiny silver tanker that picked up the milk every morning around nine o’clock. I avoided my older brother who harbored a nasty temper and emotional problems I couldn’t name. He pounced on me like a cat on a careless mouse every time I turned my back, and he pulled my pigtails until I cried. He hid our collection of Superman comic books, and he wouldn’t let me read them for hours. When I complained, my mother yelled and sent us outside to weed the peas or sweep the front porch.
"That’s not fair!” I argued, clenching my hands into indignant tight fists against my skinny thighs.
"Things are complicated,” my mother said. "Try to understand.”
But I didn’t understand, and I found refuge on Lucy’s lap. I daydreamed bloody plots for revenge that would leave my brother helpless and sobbing for mercy.
I imagined that Lucy listened with silent empathy while I shared my hurt feelings after being picked last for kickball at school. When my best friend, Susie, sat beside someone else during lunch, I held in my tears until after school and used Lucy’s leaves to wipe them away from my flushed cheeks. Lucy kept me company while I made important decisions like whether or not I should bring my hula-hoop to school or lend my new Nancy Drew mystery to Becky Sims. I wept against Lucy’s bark when my tabby cat, Buttons, got stepped on and killed by a cow.
Often I sat at Lucy’s feet doing my homework with papers and books spread out around me like a miniature classroom. Chickens scratched in the grass nearby and clucked encouragement while I worked division problems and memorized spelling words. Sometimes I just sat still and listened to the rooster crowing and my parents’ voices as they labored together around the farm. My parents always worked. They made sure we had meat and vegetables on the supper table, cookies in our lunchboxes, clean clothes, and sharp pencils for solving math problems. But often I felt like just another critter in their herd.
I didn’t have any friends living nearby. My parents didn’t have time to help me trap a wild rabbit to keep as a pet or dissect lightning bugs to discover the secret of their magical lamps. Where is the time for such stuff when a cow is about to calve and the baler is broken down? Worry stained my mother’s eyes a dull gray. She worried about my brother, veterinarian bills, and thunderclouds in the sky. My brother didn’t count as a playmate because he angered too easily.
However, each time I grabbed a cherry Popsicle from the freezer and headed Lucy’s way, her plump silhouette welcomed and charmed me. Luckily, she provided cheap entertainment with robins singing tut-tut-tut in her highest branches, ants scurrying about her bulky body searching for food, and butterflies flittering by on butterfly errands.
All winter long, Lucy stood strong against the bitter northwest winds, sleet, and snow while everything else lay sheltered or buckled down against the cold. Every Saturday morning, after a quick Cheerios and milk breakfast, I pulled on my warmest snowsuit, rubber boots, and knitted cap and traipsed through our frozen barnyard to nestle in Lucy’s lap and soak up the sun’s weak warmth.. I raved to Lucy about my perfect spelling tests, bragged about how Mrs. Grant had let me lead our class into a special school assembly, and complained about how my brother had thrown my mittens out of the school bus window. Again.
Once April arrived, I splashed through melting snow puddles to watch Lucy’s leaves bud out into blistering green, and when she burst into pink blossoms honeybees zoomed in to work. Their buzzing made me sleepy. I leaned back against Lucy’s widest limb, napped, and never once fell or got stung.
On even the hottest July afternoons, Lucy’s canopy of foliage shaded me from the heat. Once in a while, breezes ruffled my hair and rustled Lucy’s leaves. Cows chewed their cud nearby, and my brother practiced driving back and forth along our dirt road, for we saw little traffic or law enforcement in the neighborhood. I prayed my brother would veer off into the ditch and be carted away to the hospital but it didn’t happen. Instead, he earned his driver’s license and worried my parents by staying out too late with his friends.
My parents hayed the field around Lucy in mid-August. Every morning my mother stored an insulated gallon jug full of iced Kool-Aid in the shade at Lucy’s feet. When the afternoon sun prickled her skin, my mother climbed down from her tractor for a cooling drink. My father stopped stacking hay bales on the hay wagon. With both hands, he lifted the jug to his lips while sweat streamed down his cheeks and pooled in the hollow at his throat. He always offered the jug to me, and I pretended we were having a family picnic–just the three of us.
In autumn’s slanted, golden light leaves and apples rained around Lucy’s feet. They turned mushy and brown after the first hard frost. Flocks of Canadian geese flew over our farm in V-formations, honking their way south to Mexico. Every afternoon, my parents stacked hay higher and higher in the barn’s hayloft while I studied at school with a different teacher and new textbooks.
Eventually, my brother left home and I discovered lipstick and boys. I spent less and less time with Lucy until I never visited her at all. After graduating from high school, I drifted away to college with dreams of making a difference in the world and returned with a diploma and a husband-to-be.
One warm day in June, long after my parents retired from farming, I walked to the corner of the empty barn and gazed around my old playground. I marveled at how the pastures seemed smaller than I remembered, and how the perspective of adulthood changes memory’s rhyme in our minds.
Lucy was gone.
There was nothing but flat pasture where she had stood. I worried for a moment that she had lived in my imagination--a child’s remedy for stress--but the memory of her flaking bark against my cheek was too real for fantasy.
Lucy’s demise remains a mystery. I wonder whether it was a strike of lightning, old age, or bad luck beneath a chain saw blade that brought Lucy to her knees. During each season of my childhood, Lucy had provided silent comfort when my brother was unpredictable, and my parents didn’t find time to give me a second glance. Even though Lucy was made of wood and bark, not blood and bone, she had been my surrogate mother when I needed one most.
