By Andrea Marcusa
87th Street, NYC, January 3rd
They lie in street gutters, exhausted, anorexic, and balding like feather-plucking birds.
Once thick and green and smelling of pine, now with limbs that snap like toothpicks and shed a flurry of brown needles on white snow. Worse are still partially decorated trees, with silver icicles tangled on branches, broken bulbs swinging, a string of dead lights snaking its way towards the trunk. Leftovers like washed up seaweed after a storm or a forest devoured by swarms of locusts. But worst of all is my neighbor’s full green one, which I’ve walked past for weeks after it was dumped early before heat and lights could wither it. Because of the daughter. Mowed down on a street corner, the driver as young as the victim and as high as December stars. The building handyman took the tree down and lay it on the street corner a week before the holiday. That bejeweled tree too vibrant, too cheery to remain upright and lit.
Now two days after New Year’s, the tree’s still there, rich and dense among other tired-out discarded ones, reminding me. It’s been a harsh holiday season.
In the next weeks, the dumped trees will be chewed up and spat out and turned into wood chips. A sanitation worker will feed each one, watching the jaws shred wood, needles, and bark and then spray it into green and brown piles for bagging. All that joy, happiness and heartbreak.
Bound, shipped, scattered.
What We Now Live With
As I pulled the door to our beach bungalow closed for the last time this summer and felt the lock click into its hollow, I looked up and saw the sun had already shifted and now bathed the back porch in pale fall light. I knew that the real world was almost here again.
My children and husband were already in the car, so filled to the brim it sat low to the ground and although soft jazz was playing on the car stereo, we were all in our own worlds. I considered the winter months ahead and didn’t know what they would bring. A spray of angry bullets in a classroom, a flood of dammed-up bitterness surging in our streets, a headstone with an unexpected name?
I imagined our neighborhood in the city, how when we left, last century’s houses were being pulled down and turned into piles of bricks, and week after week concrete and glass floors were pushing higher and higher, casting long shadows that had never been there before. Would they be so tall that they’d scrape the clouds when I returned? Would winter storms batter our shores again or pile up record-breaking peaks of snow or send rescue boats into our streets? Only a few years ago, such worries would never have filled my mind with the simple shift of seasons.
I settled into my seat, buckled my belt, and I listened to the gravel churn under the wheels as my husband backed the car out the driveway. When we turned onto the road, I just couldn’t look back on all the shuttered peace and happiness we had found in the safety of a home away from assaulting headlines and posts, and warring TV news people and heads of state. For four weeks, we’d lived in a news and internet void filled with the sweet calls of birds, the citron glow of fireflies blinking haphazardly into the night, the flights of herons as they dipped into the bay and flew off with a fish that gleamed in the sunlight, the sound of dice rolling onto a Monopoly board, and the whistle of badminton shuttlecocks. Our weather forecasts came from the heavens: “Red sky at night, sailors delight. Red sky at dawn, sailors forewarn.”
As our car pulled farther and farther away, the feeling I’d put to rest for four weeks stirred. The one that made me feel as though I was living on borrowed time and that this happiness that I savored for a few weeks was not mine to possess, but only taste. That despite the peace and joy still circulating in the car carrying the four of us forward, a fear of what I couldn’t foresee gripped me so that even the traffic lights turning green, yellow, red, seemed to count down.
As we pulled farther and farther away, I thought of the millions of parents all over who, like me, were holding this huge untenable thing called family.
Forever wondering how to keep it whole.
About the Author:
Andrea Marcusa’s literary fiction, essays and poetry have appeared in The Baltimore Review, Booth, Citron Review, New South, River Styx, River Teeth and others. She’s received recognition from the writing competitions Glimmer Train, Third Coast, New Letters, and Press 53 and been nominated for several Pushcart Prizes. Andrea divides her time between creating literary works and photographs and writing articles on medicine, technology, and education. To learn more visit: andreamarcusa.comor follow her on twitter @d_marcusa .
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