The Wood

It hadn’t rained on her home in over 17 years. During that time there were droughts and there were floods, but the rain never touched her roof. Before climate change, before the dust bowl, before the river that ran sideways through the back of her property dried up for good, two trees were planted at opposite corners of her yard, and over time their branches grew to interlock with one another like a great umbrella. Stretched out long and lean, their limbs had grown so thick together that it hadn’t rained on her home in 17 years.

The last time the rain did touch her home the trees barely held their own against the wind and the water. They tore their branches out, thrashing all night long as she lay awake beneath, counting the seconds between thunderclaps and walking imaginary paces to where she figured lightning had struck. The dogs howled downstairs as water dripped through the gutters onto the porch below, softening the wood that would split open five years later during the hottest summer she’d ever seen.

That was the summer he left her. In June the wood on the porch had split in several places and it was too hot to try and fix. By that August whole planks were jumping loose from their nails, splintering under the lightest steps and springing their pieces all over, ragged sawdust breaking under the foot of the movers who had come to remove his old wingback chairs, his china hutch. She would follow them to the door with each trip they made for something else, and then she’d bend down to pick up rotted fragments of wood they’d left behind.

That winter the siding began to decay, the gate no longer swung shut, the roof above the kitchen was missing tiles. To stay warm she started bringing pieces of the porch inside to burn in the fire and the heat radiated through the thin walls creating warmth she had never known when he still lived there. A heat so intense sometimes she’d have to walk away from it to cool off, even as the snow fell outside and the windows cracked with ice. She would sit in her living room watching the wood burn and she could hear the wind in the kitchen, whistling through the cracks in the roof, through the empty rooms and hallways.

Her home had fallen apart. The porch where they had stood to watch the crows fly in circles above their fields was now what warmed her each night. The kitchen where she had blistered her feet making hot meals and cold drinks was a cavern now, icy and vacant. The bedroom where they’d slept for years together under a quilt she had made with frail hands and bad eyesight was now full of dead leaves that had fallen through the gaping holes in the roof. Piles of dead leaves scattered across the floor, the bed, the window sill.

But the trees kept her dry.