It was just as she said it would be: the reddish light glancing off the hill, filtering through the summer’s yellowing grass. I was close to where the blue oak should be. “Stop,” I said, for no other reason than to hear a sound other than the scrub jays shrill retorts, the barb-wire twanging from a breeze somewhere along the fence’s many-miled length. I knelt to sit momma’s ashes down in the grass. Instead of the soft thud, porcelain against earth, there was a resounding thunk. I swept away pebbled dirt and wisps of straw-grass, to find— momma’s tree, leveled by something stronger than the 50 years that had passed since she was last here. A deep cleft scarred the trunk where lightning had broken it like a promise. I pulled the faded picture from my back pocket; the tree momma spent much of her childhood around now only existed on its yellowing surface. In the evening light, the blue oak seemed to shimmer and ghost across the film: gone was the knot where it had grown around the barb wire fence, metal sticking out its trunk like a rotted tooth; gone were the limbs stretching like compass points over the horizon to anywhere except here; gone was momma’s name carved with a chunk of broken glass; gone was momma’s wish to climb it one last time. The meadow swayed arid and dusty in the heat as I picked up the jar, the orange of the sunset arcing across the porcelain. I started to pull the top off the vase, then put it back on, tucked the vase under my arm and walked back across the field to my car. Momma had come too far to find out she could never go home.
Indigo MoorMany thanks, my friend! jm
