Catherine Yeates
My feet slid across the wood flooring as it gleamed, shiny in the morning light. It was fresh, installed only a few months earlier and still unmarred by the scuffmarks and scrapes of daily life. There wasn’t much time to enjoy it, nor the newly painted porch. I passed the glass doors leading outside, gliding through the kitchen to the mudroom. There, I tugged on my shoes and entered the garage, where cans of leftover paint sat stacked, waiting for new owners who might need them.
As I backed my car out of the driveway, I glanced at the neatly trimmed lilac bushes. They were now in bloom, looking picture-perfect and ready for someone else to call their own. The other shrubs and bushes were neatly pruned, and the bright red post of the mailbox stood out from the street. I nodded with satisfaction; that was newly painted as well.
It was a ten-minute drive to the woods on the outskirts of town. The trees were green and lush. In the fall, the leaves had turned brilliant red, orange, and gold. The light streaming through them had cast a comforting glow across the trails, and I felt a pang of melancholy at not spending another autumn here. In the winter, snow had covered the ground, turning dirt and packed leaves to slippery mud. Despite that, I had walked these trails each week.
I parked my car, and as I walked to the trailhead, my mental map unfurled. It marked each place where I had told my worries to the trees. The ash and oak trees took my anxieties and sent them down to the earth, where they were transformed—composted into fuel instead of the poison they became when I carried them in my body.
The birds grew quiet as I crossed into the south woods; I would have known I was approaching the old dead tree from the absence of sound alone. The tree stood like a single headstone marking a tiny graveyard. Lightning had ripped the trunk in two, and the upper section lay in pieces. The lower section of the trunk remained upright, still rooted in the ground. A crack through the middle opened like a screaming mouth, and a huge knot formed an eye. The tree was dead, only a ghost left.
I had told my anxieties to this tree as well, dead as it was. And it had received them, channeled them down through its decaying roots. In exchange, it had shared its past life with me. Its growth from a tiny seedling to a massive oak. The burn of lightning. Its fall to the ground. Today, I was a ghost as well. Not dead, but no longer truly living in this town. My house was empty, most of the things that had made it a home gone, boxed up and taken away.
A squirrel perched on the edge of the hole in the trunk and then disappeared within it. I inclined my head toward the tree, placing my hands together in prayer. The tree was dead, but I could still thank the ghost.