It's Only a Tree
By Mialise Carney
We planted the tree way too early in the year, I knew it didn’t have a fighting chance. With my hands raw and shaking, I dug my shovel into the half-frozen dirt while Amalie stomped around the blossoming hole, her light-up sneakers flashing in the March gloom. It was the first thing I planted when I bought that ranch myself—it looked so lopsided and brittle with dry crumbling soil and the tiniest bundle of roots I’d ever seen. I took a picture with my yellow Kodak of Amalie standing beside the tree in her puffy snow coat, her tiny fist just big enough, steady enough, to close around its trunk.
In the summer it grew, and she grew. In the fall, it didn’t drop its leaves like it should have. Its tiny branches clung tight like it thought the soft green maple edges would protect it from the cold instead of bogging it down under layers of snow, and ice, and sleet. In the winter, it crumbled, and I swore I could hear each tiny branch crack, splinter off to the earth, to the inches of snow drift piling up against its naked bark. I was so scared the pipes were going to freeze, that Amalie was going to freeze, that we were going to get buried alive.
One morning Amalie got a fever so high that she stopped speaking. She just stared across the kitchen table, her eyes far away and empty until they rolled back into her head and she crumpled out of her small chair, seizing. Through the winter she slept in my bed and I stayed awake all night staring at her face and I swear I could hear the cracking, but I couldn’t be sure if it was the tree, or the pipes, or her.
In the fall during her first week of fourth grade, we made a birdhouse with a kit I bought discounted at the craft store. It was held together with old glue I found in the basement and we painted it messy acrylic reds and blues. I don’t know if birds see color, but Amalie thought that would bring the robins in, like they’d mistake it for home. We strung it up with shoelaces on the tree’s one sturdy branch and every morning before school she would sit by the window, spill sugary cereal milk down her chin, and wait for the momma bird to come home.
For a few summers, I was convinced it was dying. It stopped growing, its leaves still hanging on way past the season, its thickened trunk splitting, peeling open in the middle and if I ran my hand along it, it pulled away in pieces. I read every book about trees and about girls. I watched every video about fertilizing and listening. Amalie made friends at school and played soccer most weeknights and didn’t wait for the birds in the morning. She cried when she split her lip open while playing lacrosse and she cried when some girl made fun of the birthmark on her shoulder, and she seemed so brittle some days, all sharp elbows and bowing knees and a trembling frown. Sometimes when I hugged her I was so scared that she’d flake into pieces, that she’d dust like a moth.
We fight and I forgive her and she ignored me when I drove her to high school in the cold mornings. The tree watched as I hosted her 14th birthday party, dropping languid caterpillars across our checkered picnic tablecloth and over Amalie’s shoulders. It watched her learn to bike ride and roller skate and drive and it shades us, tall and blooming and growing up, growing out.
I worked all the time and then when I wasn’t even looking, the tree shot up, spread its branches out, growing bushes and bushes of lime green leaves, thick and heavy with rain. Amalie worked part-time at the department store and volunteered on weekends at the animal shelter and didn’t cry when her best friend made new best friends or when her first boyfriend broke up with her over text. The leaves sprayed a steady sunlight across our small yard and into our front windows. The tree was strong, and I didn’t need to worry that when the snowplows drove by that they might swerve in a squall and knock it over, take a chunk out of its waist.
The summer before Amalie goes to college, the tree spills mountains of ants. The birdhouse has faded to a periwinkle, dried from the sun and covered in cobwebs, bundles of crisp, yellow grass spilling from its entrance, remnants of a nest, of a home. I water the lawn and watch the ants trundle up and down, in and out, until I hear crackling and popping all night in the ceiling, in the walls. The old fear crawls in with an infestation of carpenter ants, and I watch Amalie’s bedroom light flicker yellow under her door all hours of the night. I want to ask her to sleep in my room, I want to make sure the cracking is coming from the ceiling and not from her.
The exterminator comes in the coolest day of August, when it’s crisp like autumn and smells like dried up grass and Amalie is showing me pictures of her dorm room. He shows me the pathway, from the tree to the house, the mother nest, the satellite. He shows me how they burrow, dig themselves into the softest warm wood, make a new home. He tells me the tree must go, or otherwise my house will be slowly chewed bit by bit until there are ants in every corner, until the beams start to shake with the weight.
When they tear it out of the ground, I cry and cry and Amalie stares at me blankly. It’s only a tree, Dad, she says. It’s only a tree.
THE END