A Life of Bright Ideas

Prologue

Epilogue—1978

Bright Idea #100:

I’ve always had an attachment to trees. Most likely because of my uncle Rudy, a farmer who knew the secrets of trees and seeds and wind and water every bit as well as my aunt Verdella knew the secret of how to love. He was always there to pluck an analogy from trees with which to assure me that hearts can sustain themselves in even the longest droughts of hope, and that something beautiful can take root and bloom in lives that have become wastelands. I clung to every one of his stories—dropped into my days like simple trivia—because, well, I guess it’s like my first (and really, my only) true best friend, Winnalee Malone, said: “You have to believe in something, or what’s the point?”

.   .   .

I don’t remember much about the day my ma died, but I remember that night. Aunt Verdella stretching a sheet across the couch near midnight, and bringing Uncle Rudy a pillow. My two-year-old brother squirming himself to sleep between Aunt Verdella and me on a bed that smelled like vanilla and work clothes and sunshine, her hand bridged to my arm, stroking it when I cried softly, and squeezing it when my sobs jiggled the bed.

Aunt Verdella’s hand didn’t drift off until she did, and she moaned in her sleep. I lay still at the edge of the bed for hours, my eyelids slammed shut to keep in the tears. And when sobs formed in my chest, I bit the inside of my cheek until I tasted blood, which felt easier to swallow than grief. I knew that if Aunt Verdella woke, she’d only start crying along with me, and she’d already cried a river’s worth of tears. Finally, when I couldn’t keep quiet any longer, I slipped out of bed, circled the couch so I wouldn’t wake Uncle Rudy, and went outside.

It was almost dawn and the sky was still wearing the stains of yesterday’s storms. It was misting and foggy, and wet grass clung to my bare feet like hair clippings as I hurried to the tree that had been every bit a part of my childhood as Winnalee.

We called it our “magic tree” because it spun us off to faraway places, and brought us home by lunchtime. It kept our “adventure bag” (an army knapsack that held the items we believed we’d need when we snuck off to Dauber Falls in search of the fairies Winnalee was convinced lived there) hidden in the hole at its feet, safe from Tommy Smithy, Uncle Rudy’s fourteen-year-old farmhand. And after the Malones left without warning, our magic tree kept Winnalee’s Book of Bright Ideas for me until I found it. I’d read that book so many times since that summer, that I knew every “bright idea” by heart.
Just looking at the tree that had been the keeper of our innocence that summer of 1961 made my tears run like sap, and I ran stumbling to meet it, like people do when they’re being reunited with family from across a sea.

I hadn’t climbed that tree since Winnalee left, and my fourteen-year-old body, skinny and gangly as it was, felt heavy and awkward as I reached around a thick, low-hanging branch and swung my legs up to wrap around it. The bony bark scratched the inside of my thighs as I scooted down the limb, Aunt Verdella’s nightie bunching around my hips.

The barkless platform in the fork of the tree that once held two pairs of dusty feet couldn’t contain my ladies’-size-eights, but cupped my heels. I leaned back against one of the three thick limbs and looked up at branches that stretched toward Heaven, as if they, too, were reaching for Ma. Questions about why she had to go into the basement when she did played in my head like taps, and I had to bend my head forward or drown. I cried for my ma. I cried for my brother. I cried for my dad, my aunt, my uncle. And then I begged the magic tree to take me away. Far away, to lands where fairies played, and Winnalee waited. Where nothing could find me but innocence.

Instead, it was Uncle Rudy who found me. Sitting in the fork, straddling the limb I’d leaned against, my arms and legs wrapped around it like a child being carried. “Button?” he called.

I blinked awake and saw him below me, one hand extended and the other dangling at his side. The grass was bright from its washing and Aunt Verdella’s nightgown was damp on my skin. “Come on, honey,” Uncle Rudy said.

As he helped me down, I could see Aunt Verdella standing at the kitchen window, her hand pressed to her mouth.

Uncle Rudy put one arm around me and took a photograph out of his pocket. “I ever show you this, Button?” he said, handing it to me. “I took it up on Lake Superior, when your dad and I went up there on a fishing trip, right after he graduated.” I stared down at the photo with the same skeptical wonder with which I once gaped at what appeared to be photos of real fairies. I squinted at Uncle Rudy, who had shrunken to five feet seven while I was growing, his eyes now level with mine.

“I know. I know,” he said, nodding. “Looks impossible, don’t it? A tree that size growin’ on the top of a big rock jutting out of the water, no soil beneath it. But lookie here,” he said, tracing his stiff finger along a thick rope that ran from the base of the tree across thin air, then disappeared off the edge of the page. “I didn’t get it in the shot, but over here was a bluff some twenty feet from the rock, and these roots were stretched to it like an umbilical cord.” He took his cap off, rubbed the top of his half-bald head, and pumped it back in place. “Anyway, I want you to have it,” he said, giving me a pat.

I didn’t get the chance to ask him how that tree knew which direction to send its roots in, or how it survived until it reached solid ground, because Aunt Verdella was already on the porch, her arms reaching, and all I wanted was to get to them. But later, four years later, to be exact, I came to understand for myself how that tree survived. And then, how it thrived.

I was upstairs in Grandma Mae’s old house, in the room wallpapered with army-green ivy and a window seat, a stack of shirts on hangers bending my wrist, when Aunt Verdella shouted my name. She didn’t call out “Evy”—short for Evelyn, which is what most people called me—but “Button,” the nickname Uncle Rudy gave me when I was little. My stomach tightened from the fear in Aunt Verdella’s voice, and I tossed the shirts on the bed and jumped over a row of cardboard boxes. I raced across the hall to the window in the pink flower-papered room facing my aunt and uncle’s house, and butted my nose against the rusty screen. Aunt Verdella, shaped like a snowman made wrong for as long as I could remember, with only one big ball for her body, instead of two, and normal-sized
limbs that looked stick-skinny in comparison, was almost to the dirt road separating her house from Grandma Mae’s. “Aunt Verdella?” I called.

Her arms were going like two twigs caught in a windstorm as she gestured back toward her house, pointing high. “Boohoo!”

I looked straight ahead and saw my six-year-old brother, Boohoo (Robert Reece until Uncle Rudy dubbed him Boohoo, because of his ability to use a pout to get his way), walking along the peak of her roof, a red towel faded to pink draped over his shoulders—he thought Spider-Man wore a cape like Superman. Boohoo held a skein of pumpkin-orange yarn above his head. “My God!” I cried, then flew down the stairs like I was on fire.