EVERGREEN

Victoria Heath

It is the first Winter with you.

We buy a Christmas tree, a real one, the type my mother would never let me have as a child. We position it in the corner of the dining room and spend the rest of the evening drinking white wine and adorning its branches with baubles. As you stand to put the star on the top (not an angel, because you always had stars as a child and I am happy to continue this tradition), the needles cascade onto the carpet like green flecks of snow. I don’t want to vacuum them up, even if this means we will be picking green from our socks and hair for the next few weeks. On Christmas Day, we stifle our laughter as my mother pulls a pine needle out of her glass of prosecco. Weeks later, I keep recalling this moment in fits of giggles. You ask why I am still not over it, and I want to say that it makes me happy to see her as the butt of a joke for once. But instead, I tell you that some things are just funny like that, and all the potential conversations about imperfect families remain shut.

It is the first Spring without you.

My mother texts me once during Spring, one long message to tell me exactly which flowers I should start planting; that avocados are the new superfood, and that smearing Amazonian mud clay on your face is the latest form of self-care. In the weeks following her message, the flowers in our garden begin to crop up between mounds of melting snow. Next to the budding flowers stands our Christmas tree that we dragged through the house and into the garden. You wanted to have the same one each year. A tradition, you laughed as we dug through the frost-covered soil in January. Now, I pluck a nearby budding flower from the soaked ground, roll it in my palms until the petals bleed their pinkness onto my skin. Watching its pigment burst all over my hands, its seeds sputtering out onto my palm. I throw the seeds into the ice.

It is the first Autumn without you.

From the kitchen window, I watch as the leaves turn into red and yellow mush in the rain - the Christmas tree the only green thing left in our garden. I find the number for a local gardener in the newspaper, calling him for a quote to get rid of it. He offers to do it for an obscene amount of money, so instead I pay twenty dollars for some second-hand blinds and fit them over the little window directly behind the kitchen sink. This way, I can wash the dishes alone.

It is the first Winter without you.

I hold on to my own hand this year, buried inside the kangaroo pocket of my hoodie, the curve of my fingernails pressing against my palm. The Christmas lights of stores heave their red and green fluorescence at me, the whine of Christmas music inescapable in every crevice of the town. So, I find myself receding away from the festivities, spending most of my winter in the house as snow falls on everything like pepper.

On the day before Christmas Eve, my mother shows up to the house with a huge cardboard box in her arms. She arrives like a flurry, immediately pointing out the complete lack of anything!!! on the living room walls where I had spent the last several weeks taking down some old photos of us. She drags the tree across the floor to the dining room, disturbing the grooves in the carpet I had made with the vacuum. The tree will go up whether I want it to or not, so I don’t bother to lift myself off the sofa.

The sound of a knife dragging through cardboard. I lean forward, peering through to the dining room as she puts up the Christmas tree, fanning out and fluffing its plastic branches. She says something about how beautifully big it is, and I murmur a noise that sounds like approval. We exchange a few words as she decorates the tree alone, things about her job and my job, the fact it’s getting dark early and the closure of the local mall, all topics that we rotate between as if it were a script. Just when I think she is about to leave, could you put the star on the top comes out of her mouth. It’s a barely audible request, a little whisper of a thing. I open my palm out to her like a clam shell and she places the star into it, and I scrape a dining chair across the floor to the foot of the Christmas tree. Standing on top of the chair, I steady myself and put the star into the top of the tree, artificial pines digging into my fingers as I jam it in place. From this height, I look down at my mother, noticing the smallness of her frame, her hunched shoulders, the smile forming across her mouth at the sight of the completed tree. She has a lipstick smear across her chin, but apart from this she looks perfect, doll-like happiness.

Through the glass door behind the tree, a flurry falls outside, snow pulsating out of the clouds like the smattering of icing sugar over a cake. The whole world bathed in whiteness: white houses, white-topped fences, white clouds bursting at the seams. And yet amongst the whiteness, I made out the silhouette of our Christmas tree in the darkness. Unattended to for almost a year, covered in snow. Away from the house that was once ours and now was just mine, lonesome in the bitter night frost, our unchanging, undying Christmas tree.