The back door slammed shut. The woman looked up from her laptop and ran her fingers through her short gray hair. Her sister?

She plodded downstairs in scruffy slippers, one hand gripping the oak handrail, the other clutching drugstore reading glasses. It wasn’t her sister.

It was the boy. 

#             

The boy’s mother had knocked on her door two years ago. They had just moved in next door. Her boy had tripped on a maple seedpod and scraped his hand. Did she have a Band-Aid? 

The woman grabbed a bandage from the bathroom and handed it to the mother. The boy was studying his sneakers. He looked lost in an oversized Eeyore sweatshirt.

His mother brushed the boy’s black curls away from his big eyes. She explained that the boy did not like talking to people other than her. And sometimes her, too.

The woman grinned.

That’s OK. I don’t like talking to people sometimes, either.

The next day, the boy and his mother dropped by to say thank you. The boy wordlessly handed the woman a crayon drawing of the errant maple tree, its winged seedpod in flight. 

The woman looked at the picture, all baby blue and forest green and sunny yellow, the colors of guilelessness.

She crouched down to look the boy in the eye, grimacing at the stiffness in her knees. 

I like trees, too, the woman said. 

To be honest, she had loved trees since she was about the boy’s age and saw the golden leaves of a quaking aspen come alive in the wind.

#

The woman was a botanist for a Chicago environmental nonprofit. The other day, she gave a presentation to teenagers at a local high school. No one had reacted when she revealed her big finish, a 3D computer model of trees blinking out across the planet. Jesus, really? 

Maybe she should retire before her knees gave out, after too many hiking trips to take cuttings of sweetbay magnolia trees in Pennsylvania or plant Joshua tree seedlings in the Mojave Desert or…She’d had no time to get married or have kids, or, as her sister put it, “settle down.” 

These days, she had twenty-five extra pounds on her small frame and a heart full of suppressed rage. Two weeks after she met the boy, she and other volunteers had planned a protest downtown at a ginkgo tree that was going to be razed for a parking lot. Before the bulldozers came, the protesters would chain themselves to the 100-foot-tall ginkgo, and the news cameras would roll, and…

On that cold fall morning, the woman was the only one who showed up, except for a blogger who took a picture of her holding a rumpled sign that said, “Breathe much? Thank a tree.” 

Back home, the woman collapsed on the couch and called her big sister. 

I’m tired of this shit. I’m going to retire.

It’s about time you settled down, her sister said.                                                                                       

#

The boy’s mother had followed the ginkgo tree protest online. She showed the boy the picture of the woman in front of the tree. 

She’s nice, the boy said.

The boy and the woman took walks in their neighborhood, past squat brick bungalows flying American flags or Cubs banners. The boy would slow his pace to match hers. She’d stop to have him finger the soft, hairy leaves of a hawthorn tree or listen to the wind whip through a willow tree.               

One afternoon, the boy told her he had learned something scary in school. As the planet gets warmer, trees like weeping willows will not get enough water, his teacher said. They might get sick and disappear forever. 

The woman winced.

Next time, I’ll show you how to grow a little willow tree from a cutting, OK?

He nodded. 

When she walked into her house, the woman’s cell phone rang. Just that weekend, she and other volunteers had cleared invasive buckthorn from public lands in southern Illinois to give the young oaks and hickories a chance to thrive. 

On the phone, she heard the catch in her friend’s voice. 

What, she said.

The trees are all gone, her friend told her. Some kids set a tree on fire for kicks, and the wind…

The woman’s stomach clenched.

Christ, she said.

Later that month, the boy invited the woman over for his birthday. She was his only guest. The woman gave him a little shovel tied with raffia ribbon. Raffia, she told him, comes from a palm tree that grows big and strong in the tropics.                                    

#

The next morning, the woman heard the back door shut. When she got downstairs, the boy beckoned to her.

Come see.

She followed him to a sunny spot near her red fernleaf peonies. Something the color of straw poked out of the damp soil. She leaned in for a closer look.

The boy had planted the strands of raffia from his birthday gift and watered them with his Winnie the Pooh water bottle. 

We’ll grow a big palm tree that likes hot weather, he said. So all the trees won’t go away.

The woman closed her eyes and breathed in the scent of her peonies.

Sixteen years later, on a trip to catalog trees in the Caucasus mountains in Georgia, she would catch the barely-there fragrance of fernleaf peonies and think of the boy’s gift. She would text the boy that day, and he’d grin when he saw her message after a long day of fieldwork in a bristlecone pine grove in Nevada.

In her backyard, under the gentle sun, she sank to her aching knees. A prayer popped into her head. Her grandmother would mutter the words of an Oglala Sioux holy man over hopeless trees on their family farm in South Dakota. 

Nourish it then, that it may leaf and bloom and fill with singing birds.                                           

– Renee Tawa

Note: In March 2022, a much shorter version of this story (Renee Tawa’s first flash fiction piece) was published in 10th Ward Lit, the online literary magazine of the city of Evanston, Illinois.