Eastern White Pine

     “Ugh, this chicken again?! Seriously? You always make the same two things, I’m so sick of them,” I whined as I strolled into the dining room, late for dinner. My mother sighed but didn’t respond, dropping a piece of baked chicken on her own plate. 

          “So when are you going to try to tell us about Seattle?” my father asked, showing a rare awareness of where I had been recently. He didn’t irritate me nearly as much as my mother, probably because he stayed out of the mundane day-to-day teenager-parent conflicts by allowing my mother to bear nearly the entire burden of parenting me.

         University of Washington? It had been like a few days in a kelly green Narnia – the mist that felt like walking in a cloud, the huge pine trees, and the dark water right at the end of the idyllic campus. It felt like I could breathe again, like I wasn’t trapped in a boring ugly wasteland of houses that nicer than ours and commuters who drove nicer cars than my parents did. Before the trip I had assumed I would stay on the east coast for college simply because it hadn’t occurred to me to leave, but on the flight home I had written the application essays for University of Washington and Lewis and Clark in Portland. Certainly that would not be revealed to my parents in this conversation though, not after my mother had been nagging me to do the Rutgers secondary application for the past month because it was “such a good school, and so affordable”.

          “Seattle was awesome,” I start, inarticulately. “Mary has really cool friends, and we hung out at all these great coffee shops with art on the walls.” We also smoked weed in the courtyard, and drank bitter strong beer called IPAs with her friends, I don’t say. “And the campus is so pretty. It’s right in the city but also right on the water. You can rent canoes! The trees are all huge, not like the shitty little trees around here.” What an absurd thing to say, complaining about trees, but I just couldn’t help seeing how much worse everything was here. I knew I was being horrendous but it was as if my brain was broken. At 17, I felt claustrophobic in my parent’s perfectly normal suburban New Jersey house. Despite all of the miles I ran on the varsity cross-country team, I was constantly restless. It seemed like my skin was one size too small. Senior year of high school had only begun a little over two months ago but was already interminable.

          “What do you mean, the trees were better? Do you have to find something wrong with everything here?” my mother asked, sounding more defeated than irritated.

          “They were all like that lopsided one by the driveway, but huge and beautiful. Like so tall you couldn’t even guess how tall they were,” I was fully committed to the idea that everything everywhere else was better than here.

         My parent’s eyes caught across the table, a flicker of a question and immediate answer, a conversation without words only possible between two people who had been married as long as they had. 

          “That lopsided tree saved your life you know,” my father said. 

          “What are you talking about?” I sneered, thinking about whether I had ever noticed that pine tree do anything except occasionally drop sad dead needles onto the car.

          “I can’t believe we never told you this,” my mother started. “It was December, a week or two between Christmas, and it was freezing. You were 18 months old, bundled up like the world’s cutest marshmellow.”

         I rolled my eyes, wishing she would get to the point.

         She continued, “I try to not start the car to warm it up in the morning because it wastes gas and it’s so bad for the environment, but that day I did because of how cold it was. Your car seat was in the middle of the backseat. We had shoveled a path to the driver’s side door and the back door behind it, and I had just put you down in the car seat. I was trying to buckle you in but you were squirming around, and my hands were too cold. I couldn’t make my fingers work to latch the buckle. I was blowing on my right hand and trying to hold you in the seat with my left hand when I heard a loud crack and was knocked down to my knees.”

         At this point in the story my father jumps in. “I was working from home because of the snow, and I heard a huge crash and then screaming. It sounded like a wounded animal noise; I didn’t even think it could be your mother. I came downstairs and opened the door to see that a car – a little silver Honda – had run over the lawn and directly into the tree. The front of the car was up on the tree trunk, and the tree was leaning over on the roof of our car in our driveway.” 

         He continued, “I ran outsider in my socks and found your mother crouched on the ground under the tree screaming. She was fine though, she had a few scratches on her face from the branches, but I could tell right away she wasn’t seriously hurt.”

          “I was just in shock,” my mother said. “Your dad snapped me out of it though. I just remember him saying ‘You’re ok, the baby’s ok.’ and it was true. You were sitting in your car seat, not even crying. I picked you up out of the seat and handed you to him through the branches, and then by the time I squeezed myself out the police had already come.”

         My father confesses, “I didn’t think about calling 911 but fortunately Ricky across the street called. Even when I saw that you and your mother were fine, it never occurred to me to worry about the driver. I still feel guilty about that.”

         My mother smiles, seemingly to herself. “I called out of work that day. I never did that because I didn’t have paid time off, but I was completely freaked out. I just sat on the couch holding you in your snowsuit while I talked to the police, and then for a long time after they left. I couldn’t stop thinking about how if the car had hit at a slightly different angle, or if the tree hadn’t been there at all we both would have been killed. You eventually started bawling because you were so hot from being in the snowsuit inside.”

          “The driver ended up being okay too. He was unconscious when the police pulled him out of his car, but he apparently left the hospital a week later. They think he was distracted by a phone call and skidded on a patch of ice. We weren’t sure if the tree would make it, especially since the ground stayed frozen for months, but we propped it back up and it did fine.”

          “So watch what you say about that eastern white pine tree,” my father concluded definitively, winking at me. 

         The next morning was the first day there was frost to scrape off the windshield. This usually served as my annual reminder to begin the season of daily laments of being the only one of my friends to not have a garage. This time though I turned the car on to warm up (a habit still staunchly discouraged by my mother), threw my backpack onto the passenger’s seat, and got back out into the crisp air. I walked over to the tree and touched its rough bark, looking up at the green needles against the flat gray sky. Of course it had grown in the last fifteen years, but now that I looked carefully at it, I could see the irregular scars along the side where the branches must have been sheared off. I couldn’t believe I’d never noticed before, I always just thought it was eccentric bordering on embarrassingly weird, like my parents and most of the things in our family’s life. It made me wonder what other scars my parents were hiding in plain sight that I was too self-absorbed to notice.