She sat in her usual chair under her usual tree in her now unusual yard. Well, I guess it was unusual to her. To any friends that came for their fix of that strong, muddy coffee and, unbeknownst to her, the infectious smile on her face that made the nearest insides with a pair of nourishing eyes stir with warmth, nothing seemed wrong. The nourishing eyes of visitors see what they need to see to feed their insides. Who needs to see the worried lines around any pair of warm brown eyes and the way cheeks gradually thin as the lips curve toward them a little less each day? She clouded their vision with her cigarettes. A smokescreen that had never failed her before. Except in the physical sense. But she wasn’t going to admit that now. To visitors, the yard looked as it had always looked. Just a little emptier— the adolescent tenants of autumn, winter, spring and summer’s past growing up and on to bigger yards. 

But she still sat there, waiting. Waiting, but not really believing in their return. Not believing in any return. The return to her home of rolling mountains and rainless days of breezes and tingling sunshine on her secret porch by the side of her house where no visitor could interrupt unless she invited them to do so; the return to the times of health when she could stand on her feet and work with her hands without worrying about where the blood was supposed to flow and how hard the tendons were allowed to work and what signs to watch for to ring the alarm for someone to jump in to help her; the return to the times when her children and children’s children filled up her yard and filled up her mind to push out the truth she knew about her declining health. A happy heart keeps the doctor away, after all. Right? That’s all it takes, right? 

What about time? What keeps time away?

There was no return. Maybe she always knew that. But now she finally saw it.

They had grown up and moved on. Their visits weren’t the same. At times they reeked of obligation. Other times they only brought half of themselves, while the other half of them were embedded into the tiny flashing screens that had become a third hand. Mostly though, they brought their problems. They didn’t have the spring of their youth to bounce back from the pain of the world that finally caught up to them. It hurt to watch. Their blood fed the asphalt and their tears watered the grass. This yard that was grown with love now equally prospered from the pain of those she loved, and not just her own. It was one of the few balances in life that she didn’t want to have.

Her heart would fill up as she watched her husband tend to his fruit tree everyday. He fixed every snapped branch, picked off every rotten entity, sprayed its leaves, spread it’s seed to other trees, and planted his chair under the fruit tree, watching it for hours. Thinking, breathing, with the tree. Trusting it to give him life as he had given it life, instead of relying on the oxygen coming through the wires from the beeping tank in the house. 

There were two more children who filled her yard. They were her joy. They chased the pain and thoughts of pain away. But the blood on the asphalt and the tears in the grass spawned problems of their own. The type of Botany that results in weeds that tangle and trip Little feet and wholly encroach Big feet. Not the safest place for children to be playing. Now they are gone too, leaving the fruit tree as the last sapling raised with hopes to breathe life into the yard again. Its roots fighting off the Botany to breathe hope into their lives again.

If she closes her eyes, she could pretend that the swingchair creaking in the wind is really creaking from their weight as they rock back and forth, their Little feet swinging. She could pretend that the fading chalk drawings on the asphalt were washed away with the rain, not the time. She could pretend that the flowers were gone because they were tucked behind Little ears and clutched in Little hands protected by Little pockets. She could pretend that the water on her face fell from the sky and not from her eyes.

A drop of cold hit her on the forehead and she looked up. The rain was announcing its impending arrival with sporadic drops and the wind was picking up. The leaves from her usual tree that always whispered shimmering stories in her ears with matching lights on her skin to distract from the silence of the yard were fueled with the anger of Irene. She continued to sit, trying to ignore their discourse, anxious and angry and void of any shimmer or comfort.

Ominous whispering.

“It’s your fault,” they hissed,

“Where did you go wrong?” they spat.

“You are tired. Your health is catching up. His health has caught up. That tree is just a tree. This yard is empty. Everyone has left. Everyone is fighting. No one is winning. You are cracking under the pressure. Cracking like the branches of the leaves I am speaking to you with. Cracking like the crack in your arm that still throbs when you think of that summer you broke it. Your money is gone. Your house is gone. Your health is gone. Your son is going. Your son is gone. He is gone.

You are alone. You are alone. You are alone.”

The words numbed her. Were her fears that offensive to the sky she had always confided in that the voices in the wind would use them against her?

They howled at her, “YOU ARE ALONE.”

Wind whipped at her face and her hair fell in front of her eyes to protect them. She quivered all over. She obliged to the Crack and let it splinter her down the middle as she felt Everything pour out of her. She held on to her cigarette and focused in on the glowing stump like it was the center of the Universe. Like if she let go, she would go spinning off into the hissing, spitting, windy darkness of all the fears that were pouring out of her like a dam gone beyond the help of even the strongest of duct tapes. This glowing stump rooted between her fingers and burning away, the only Light she could find since the One in the sky abandoned her.

Eventually, the light in the stick would do the same, leaving the ashes of what little hope  of hers that had attached themselves picked up with the breeze and swirling around her, taunting her. A macabre confetti of a party in celebration to her hopelessness. She couldn’t stand to see that light go out too. She smashed her cigarette into the ashtray before the wind could taunt her with its ashes.

She looked around the yard again. No longer empty. It was filled with her demons brought to life by the wind. The wooden porch creaked like her knees when she walked while the Little swingchairs violently whipped back and forth, devlish feet kicking with mirth. The grass rippled ominously and the potted lilac colored flowers that hung from the roof of the porch dropped soily limb-like clods onto the asphalt. All the while, the wind cackled around her.

This was not the company she was waiting for.

She shook with the tears that she was too angry to liberate but too cracked to keep from filling her warm brown eyes nonetheless. She didn’t want her body to fight the unbearable lump in her throat anymore. The thought of it closing her off from breathing life into a lifeless yard was seductive and freeing and

and she pleaded to the cackling wind

she pleaded with the leaves to plead with the branches to plead with the trunk of the tree to plead with the statuette of The Virgin Mary that stood guard beneath it

to fall on her. She yelled to the hidden Light in the sky to let the tree crack and bury her.

She closed her eyes for a long time. She heard nothing. She felt nothing. Her mouth was dry. The lump in her throat grew smaller and her breathing grew steadier again.

If this was any other morning, she would have sat under that tree for hours. She would’ve sat and thought and hid behind her smokescreen until it was time to take her medication.

For the first time in what felt like a long time, one of her sons pulled up to the house on his way to work and her heart lept with love at the sight of his tired, but smiling face. She really didn’t see him as often as she wanted to. She wiped at her face, rubbed her warm brown eyes dry and curved her lips toward her cheeks as she got into his car to go for a ride.

An hour later she returned to see that the fruit tree had uprooted and crashed down onto the Little swingset, one of the swingchairs still feebly rocking back and forth. Her ears picked up a beeping coming from an open window and her eyes followed the wires from the oxygen tank as they snaked down the steps of the porch, across the asphalt, down into the grass, and up to the lasso under her husband’s nose. He watched his fallen child in angry, hurt silence, breathing in-time with the machine for the both of them.

Her eyes traveled further down the yard and she froze as she saw her usual tree, cracked and fallen over, completely burying where she had been sitting just an hour before. The sky seemed brighter. A dull sort of bright, but the same Light that heard her daughter’s plea to a similar Virgin Mary statuette that very morning in a different part of town was watching just behind the nearest clouds

And the statuette of The Virgin Mary, unharmed, was watching just behind the nearest cracked branches of the tree She had protected for so long.

Maybe it wasn’t just the tree She had been protecting all along.