Alyssa Duran- Story 12- Week 7

Life Tree

In a place where rain came often, a blackened dirt stained pick-up truck passed by a little home that had a five year old child. The little girl watched from the window with long curly brown locks and large curious eyes as the truck hit a bump in the road and the since the back of the truck did not have a tailgate the contents of the truck were startled into sliding out onto the street in front of her.
The little girl, who had been the witness of this small catastrophe and a small, curious child, wanted to know the contents of the broken box that lay in the street. Silently she crawled towards the door, slipped on her raincoat and boots, and then moved outside to the street. She knew she would get in trouble should she be caught, but that did not stop her from tip-toeing out to the street and looking over the little chunks of broken wood to the pile that lay in front of her. She picked one of the pieces up, a football shaped little nut of a thing that she turned and twisted in her hands. Knowing full well what it was, she placed it carefully in her raincoat pocket and carried it back inside before her mother discovered she was missing from the window.
The next morning the little girl was up early and she ran to the back yard with gardening gloves far too big for her hands and a little gardening shovel her mother kept in the garage. She found a nice fresh spot and dug a fairly deep hole and planted the seed inside. She checked it every day and the rain brought the plant life. Over time, a little sprout could be noticed. That day was the little girl’s sixth birthday.
Day by day became month by month and the little girl turned thirteen she no longer noticed the tree that had sprouted from the ground and had become a distinct object in her backyard. Instead, that little girl was a teenager and was more interested in young Eric Duncan that sat in front of her in Mrs. Wheel’s classroom. On the day of her fourteenth birthday, the party was held outside and as she blew the candles on her cake and Eric Duncan kissed her cheek, a wind hit her face and the breeze caught the tree and out of the corner of her eye she saw it sway with the breeze. She remembered that rainy day and wondered why it had been so important to her to plant that tree.
Several years later and that tree was a taller, becoming something full grown and stable with thick layers of bark and beautiful yellow-turning leaves. The little girl was a woman and she was moving out of her home to go to school. Not once did that tree come to her mind as she quickly kissed her mother and hopped in the car with a group of friends who were also going to the same school. The mother had recently placed a little white patio table underneath the shelter of the tree and she walked to it, comforted by the shade on the rare sunny day, and wept at her daughter’s leaving and her first gray hair.
From that beautiful day came a rainy one when the mother had died from a sudden heart attack the week after her daughter’s graduation. The daughter came home to mourn the death of her mother, who had raised her so well. The little girl, now a woman held a small funeral gathering at that home in the backyard where the tree shaded her like it had her mother four years before at the little white patio table as she cried. The tree was larger now, easily towering over the house and winning the notice of several people as the cooed, “That is a beautiful tree. Looks like it came from a forest. How out of place it is!”
The daughter moved into her mother’s house a week later after canceling her lease on her apartment. This house was far more valuable to her than it could have ever been. Nine months later she met a man named Dennis who was just as handsome as Eric Duncan had been in the sixth grade. The girl fell in love with him immediately and he quickly fell in love with her. A year later they were married and the couple would often sit under the greatness of the tree as it watched them eating and laughing their lunch on the sunny days.
When it rained the backyard was empty, but a window still held the grandeur of the tree. One morning a heavily pregnant woman sat on the couch intending to watch television, but instead she noticed the tree through the window and realized with a fleeting memory how she had been five years old and planting that tree. That had seemed like it was yesterday, yet soon she would have a child. As she stared at the tree, a coy smile on her face, her husband walked by and stopped to stare at her placid face.
“Honey, what in the world are you doing?” She looked up, a bright smile now across her face.
“Did I ever tell you that I planted that tree?” And as she relayed the story to her husband her water broke and she felt the warm liquid seep into her pants and twelve hours later she was the mother of a bright-eyed baby boy, no longer thinking of her tree.
When the little boy was five years old the mother laughed she caught her little boy staring out the window on a rainy day like she had so many years ago. Yet, his attention span was shorter than hers had been and he ran to the television set to watch cartoons. She chuckled under her breath remembering the pick-up truck and how she had snuck out of the house. She wondered about the tree made her way to the backyard window to look at its astonishing height. The mother gasped a little as she remembered her sixth birthday and how it had been a little sprout. But then her husband wrapped his strong arms around her and her mind was swept somewhere else.
When the little boy went to college, the mother, like her mother before her, noticed a gray hair. She cried on the couch and didn’t get out of bed for three days. She had to call in sick at work and her husband worried about her, constantly calling the doctor to see if there was anything that could be done. The mother was put on depression pills for a little while and most of her time was spent on the couch watching the tree as her husband ran back and forth bringing glasses of water and blankets. Eventually, she went back to work and her family life became normal again except for the missing son which made it considerably quieter around the house.
As the mother held her retirement party she realized she had now become an old woman. Her son had long since graduated from school and had moved to a nice apartment in the city several hours away. He called regularly to talk to her and her husband and life was very pleasant. Her husband had retired nearly a year before. She had decided to keep working because she liked her job. Her knees and back had become very sore however, and she was forced into retirement. She sighed as the women around her in the backyard clapped at the retirement cake that was presented to her. As she blew out the candles a wind hit her face and caught the leaves of the tree. It swayed in the breeze and her eyes whipped around to the giant oak and she smiled as it seemed to wilt a little along with her sorrow of age.
Four days later new people moved in to the house next door and the old woman introduced herself to the young former city couple. They were kind, but quick, and liked to have things their way. Two weeks after they moved in, the old woman received a notice on her door informing her that the neighbors were complaining about the obtrusiveness of the tree on their property and wished it to be cut down. The old woman did not know how to fight this, the city regulations did not want a tree as large as the one in her backyard and she became astonished that it had lasted this long. Perhaps her former neighbors had enjoyed the tree and that is why they had not complained about it.
A large bright yellow truck pulled up several days later and the woman watched from the window on that rainy day as they cut the tree out, roots and all and promised to transfer it to a forest area where it would also thrive. This, the old woman knew, was a lie, yet she was comforted by it and could do nothing to avoid the tree’s eventual death.
As time passed the open area of the backyard became more obvious and the woman cried more and more. Once again, her husband became worried about her state of mind and her depression. Yet, he couldn’t figure why a woman could cry so much over a tree. He did not understand the revelations she had had over the tree with her life, nor did he realize how vivid that memory of her being five years old and discovering the seed was to the old woman. Nearly two weeks had gone by with this depression when the husband woke to a peacefully quiet wife who was no longer breathing.