WELL DONE! SANDY TELLS ME ABOUT DEAD PINE TREES by J.D. Isip

SANDY TELLS ME ABOUT DEAD PINE TREES by J.D. Isip

“Mother didn’t consider much to be trash.” Sandy changes the subject from her husband’s health, but keeps a steady eye on Robyn who sits across the table. It’s Christmas Eve. “People throw out useful things all the time, like Christmas trees the day after Christmas.”

Robyn says there are places where you can rent a tree for the season and bring it back to the farm when you’re done. They come in little pots. They get planted when they outgrow the pots. He read about them on the internet.

“But what if you kill it?” Lee, their son, ever skeptical of his father’s stories, challenges this concept. “Or what if you don’t want to give it back? How will they find you?”

It's past midnight. We all have to be up early in the morning to ogle Robyn and Sandy’s granddaughter, the only child among us, opening her presents, looking for that rush from our past that passes too fast. We are not so much contemplating Lee’s questions as we are attempting to stretch another Christmas to its limits.

Sandy guesses the tree farm would find you. Lee asks how that could be, but our mother moves on, “There’s nothing like piling up pine trees after Christmas and jumping in them.”

We all look around the table. One of us, maybe all of us ask, “Why would you do that?”

“Because it’s fun,” Sandy says.

We watch as she smiles. Perhaps returning at that moment to a day after Christmas, old friends wiping tree sap on their sleeves. Each one daring the others to jump first, all of their mothers still alive, unlike that pile of trees.

Robyn is getting sicker. But he married a woman who is always the first to jump.

“It doesn’t sound like fun at all,” Lee looks to me for agreement, “Sounds painful. It’s masochism is what it is.”

Sandy looks at her watch and tells Robyn to grab the stuff in the kitchen. To ask one of us for help if he needs it. Lee keeps going on about our mother’s crazy Wichita Falls stories, the dumpster diving and the dead Christmas trees. “Why would you jump into a pile of pain?”

“Honey,” she kisses her son on the cheek, puts on her coat, “That’s life.”

Robyn has gathered far too much to carry out on his own. Still, he’s surveying us; his sons and his wife, “It was a good goddamn night!” We laugh. We’re worried. We say goodnight. We’ll struggle to get up in the morning. But we will. As long as we can.

Because it’s fun.

J.D. Isip’s full-length poetry collections include Kissing the Wound (Moon Tide Press, 2023) and Pocketing Feathers (Sadie Girl Press, 2015). His third collection, tentatively titled I Wasn’t Finished, will be released by Moon Tide Press in early 2025. J.D. lives in Texas with his dogs, Ivy and Bucky.