Country Trees - Allie Wilson

ALLIE WILSON

[ 77 ] prose For my parents, my move to college was like a knife to the heart. I’m the last child of three, so my move signified their official transformation into empty nesters. Tears have been more common around my mother than words. It wasn’t like I was going out of the country like my brother. I was only moving four hours up the state. It was only logical. This school offered the most financial aid, if the world worked differently I would be going to New Hampshire. Although, my mom might not make it if I was out of state. When my mom and I took off on the awaited drive up to the school, I had made a playlist of upbeat songs and my mom had brought tissues. It had taken a week for my father to finish his tune up on my truck, not that I minded, it was older than me after all. Driving away from my hometown, where I had lived my entire life so far, I couldn’t wipe the smile off my face. I glanced out the window as we merged onto the interstate. The trees blurred past, impossible to differentiate from each other as the car picked up speed slowly, but I already knew there were five hundred and eighty-one trees between the interstate and my house. There would be about six hundred more trees before my mom had used all of the tissues she had packed in her purse. Growing up, I never saw my mother cry. Back when I was six or seven, she always had a warm smile and smelled like the kitchen, where she spent most of her time. Our kitchen was one of the biggest rooms in our house. It had an island that I could never reach without my brother lifting me and a pantry that was perfect for hide and seek. It was off-limits when the stove was on because once my sister tried to touch the swirly lights on it and my mom got really mad. When I lived there, most of the days mixed

[ 78 ] together. In elementary school, I had no reason to worry about what day it was or what month it was. I had no worries in the world, no taxes or jobs or big assignments to stress over yet. The only reason I kept the year straight was to remember when my birthday was and how old I’d be. The calendar was basically Easter, summer, school, my birthday, Halloween, and Christmas. Everything else was some floating day in the year that I knew existed but didn’t put much thought into when it popped up. Every day was spent going somewhere in the car. My sister and I would argue about what movie to watch in the backseat and only get five minutes in before we reached our destination. Mostly it was to or from school. I only started paying attention to where we were going after my brother left the house. Then my sister got to ride shotgun, so I’d spend my time staring out the window and memorizing how many trees we passed between the school and our house, since they weren’t going anywhere. Two hundred and sixty-three. That’s how I know we were on our way home from school the first time I saw my mother cry. She had gotten a phone call, which wasn’t surprising because she used her phone a lot while we drove home. After she picked up the phone, she turned onto a street and parked the car. I was confused. I knew the entire way home and this wasn’t a road I had ever been down. I remember asking why we had stopped here, enough times to earn a slap on the arm and glare from my sister. We were silent, except for my mom on the phone. Then she was yelling. I looked at the trees outside. I thought about if these would count as on the way home since we’d stopped. That would add at least seven. It was windy and my birthday was coming up, which meant the leaves were littering the road like snow if it snowed in Florida. I looked up at the sky when I got bored with the trees. It was cloudy, but not rain clouds, just a lot of pretty, white ones. I rolled down the window to let the wind rustling in the trees fill my ears instead of the high volume conversation going on in front of me. Then my mom rolled it up with her control and locked the windows. We sat there for a while, my mom yelling into her phone and me staring out the window and my sister doing whatever it

[ 79 ] prose was that she did. When she hung up, my mom threw her phone into her purse. I looked up as she did, I wanted to ask when we were going home. The words caught in my throat when I saw her slump onto the steering wheel and let out heaving sobs. Her breathing sounded weird like it was too hard for her to fill her lungs completely, so she was stopping and going. My sister hugged her back, but I couldn’t reach, so I just asked who had called. That got me another glare from my sister. “Progressive,” my mother replied, lifting herself from the wheel and wiping her eyes. As she started to drive away, she kept taking deep breaths. I was glad her lungs were working right again. “I don’t know how I’m going to tell your father… we’re going to have to file for bankruptcy.” I didn’t know what she was talking about or why she got a call from a lady in a lab coat, but my sister looked like she had just been slapped in the face. That night was fun, though. I remember that because that was one of the rare nights that my brother pulled me into his room to play video games. I never got to play video games unless I begged all night and I didn’t even have to ask then. The next few weeks brought more fun days. Some days, we got to leave school early so that Mom could meet someone. I never met them because she’d drop us off at the house my grandma and my aunt lived in before she went to meet them. My dad played pretend with me once and showed me which walls of their house he would tear down to make extra rooms. One day, we came home to boxes in every room of our house. For some reason though, I just got yelled at for building a fort in the living room. Over the weekends, Dad let my sister and I paint walls on the outside of the house. He even let me climb on the roof with him to kick off all of the dog toys we accidentally threw up there. Then things started getting weird. I’d get home and wouldn’t be able to find all of my toys. Somehow they’d ended up in the boxes in my room and I had to dig them

out almost every day. Then I got yelled at and the boxes were made off-limits. Things started disappearing around the house too. One day, the pictures in the hallway were gone. Then all the plates and bowls in the china cabinet followed suit. I told Mom that I thought there was a ghost taking all of our stuff and she just looked around the house and sighed. One Saturday, we had a garage sale, which is usually fun because we get to look through all of our old stuff in the storage room. This time, though, I kept finding furniture from my room and from the house out in the driveway. I told my dad that we were selling the wrong things and we needed to put them away and he just laughed. The last day I spent in that house, it didn’t look like my house anymore. The walls were bare and all of the rooms were void of furniture and appliances. At first, it was fun because there was more room to run around and I didn’t get yelled at when I ran down the hall. Then my mom looked around and said, “Say goodbye.” I didn’t understand what she meant. We never said goodbye when we left the house. When we walked to the car to go over to my grandma’s, I looked at the yard because there were tire ruts everywhere from people parking on the lawn. Before I crawled into the backseat, my eyes found the orange and black sign at the edge of the road. “For Sale” was printed on it. I didn’t know what those two words meant then, but I did know that one of those signs had shown up when my friend down the street had left town. I knew it meant that no one lived in that house anymore. I don’t remember much of the time it took to move into my grandma’s house. It felt like we had no more than left our old house when there were rooms set up for all of us in theirs. The days still blended together for a while. I tried not to think about our old house, which wasn’t hard since we weren’t living there anymore. I just recounted how many trees it took to get home.

prose Two hundred and forty-five. Everything was changing, but those trees were still there. I didn’t understand why we lived at my grandma’s until one day at recess, one of the kids in my class came up to me and said, “What’s it like being bankrupt?” I didn’t know what that meant, so he told me. As I stood there listening to him, a veil lifted off of my mind. I started asking a lot more questions after that day. It would be a few years until I fully understood what had happened that month. Slowly, the picture became more and more clear. Eventually, I learned to laugh at the jokes about my family’s income. It was easier than letting myself hurt over things I couldn’t change. I’d stop making birthday lists and start applying for jobs. I’d learn how to sew holes in my clothes and glue my shoes when they started to rip. I’d ignore my friends’ fancy cars and learn to love the character in my old vehicle. I’d stop counting trees. I wouldn’t need to anymore. So, as we unpacked my car at my dorm, I breathed in the new air and looked around at the trees and welcomed this next step. I wouldn’t be counting the endless trees between me and home. Soon enough this would be my home and I wouldn’t have to worry about how long it would stay my home. Then someday, somewhere else, farther away would become home, when I take the next step.