LJ Idol Three Strikes: Prompt 4 - "The axe forgets; the tree remembers"
Trees are very special, and they remember everything. That’s what Grandma Willow had always told her, ever since she was a very little girl.
“Everything?” she had always asked, unsure that anyone could remember everything.
“Everything,” Grandma Willow would say. “They see everything and know everything, and they remember it all. That’s how they know who to protect.”
At the age of three, Fern liked the idea that the big tree by her window was looking out for her when she slept. “The tree protect me?”
“As long as you are good to it,” Grandma Willow would say.
“I be good,” Fern would tell her.
At the age of five, Fern was more of a daredevil. She liked to climb the fence posts around the land that her family lived on. She liked to walk on the railings before seeing how far she could jump off them. Sometimes she climbed the trees when Grandma Willow was sleeping.
One day, Grandma Willow caught her kicking the tree outside her bedroom window in frustration with her little red sneaker. The tree had been too slippery and had made her fall.
She had never seen Grandma Willow look more disappointed than when she called her name, Fern’s foot freezing in mid-kick.
“What you just did,” Grandma Willow told her. “The tree will remember forever, a hurt that will never go away, even as you forget.”
Fern scowled at her. “It’s just a stupid tree.”
Grandma Willow took her into the house and into the kitchen. She pulled out the tea set and made the two of them steaming mugs of her best orange-flavored tea before sitting across from her, her old, wrinkled face still sad and disappointed.
“The tree outside your bedroom window, Fern, is very special.”
“You always say that,” Fern muttered.
“Because it’s true,” Grandma Willow said. “Many, many moons ago - more than you or I could ever count - lived some of our ancestors. They lived here on this very land where our house now sits.”
Fern took a sip of her tea, growing quiet as Grandma Willow talked.
“One of our ancestors was named Rose, after the flower. Rose was very kind and very brave, and she loved her family very, very much. As much as I love you and your siblings and your mother.”
“That’s a lot of love,” Fern said.
“It is,” Grandma Willow agreed. “But Rose was very sick, and even though she was brave, she was very scared. Her husband was going to get called to the war, and she was scared her children would be left alone.”
“Was Rose going to go away too?” Fern asked. “Because she was sick?”
“Yes,” Grandma Willow said. “She was not going to be able to stay in her human body anymore.”
“That’s very sad.”
“It is,” Grandma Willow agreed. “All Rose wanted was to keep her family safe. But Rose got sicker and sicker, and she knew she didn’t have much time. But then one night, someone came to her door. No one knows who. Maybe a sorceress. Maybe a witch.”
“A witch?” Fern repeated, her eyes growing wide.
“A good witch,” Grandma Willow said. “She told Rose that when she could no longer stay in her human body that she would be given a way to watch over her family and protect them always. She just had to do one thing.”
“What?” Fern whispered, her tea forgotten by this point in the story.
“She would have to choose one girl from every generation to also be the protector of the family. They each would remain on this land for always, with the power to keep the people who lived here safe from harm.”
“Did she do it?” Fern asked.
“She did,” Grandma Willow said. “She agreed. And a few nights later, Rose left her human body. At the same time, the tree that is now outside your bedroom window appeared.”
Fern stared at her grandmother.
“She became a tree?” she asked.
“Yes,” Grandma Willow said. “And so does one other girl per generation. That is why the trees on our land are so strong and powerful. They are always protecting us. And it is why we cannot hurt them, even with our little feet.”
Fern nodded. “I won’t do it again,” she said.
Later that day, she touched the bark on the tree under her bedroom window. “I’m sorry for kicking you, Rose,” she whispered. “I hope you don’t hate me.”
--
As the years passed and Fern grew older, the stories her Grandma Willow had told her, about the ancestors and the trees, became silly fables from a silly old woman, something to laugh about with her brothers, like on the day her brother tried to chop down the tree in front of her bedroom window.
“Stupid tree won’t come down!” her brother said, wiping sweat from his brow. Indeed, there was a slash on the tree’s trunk but no indication that it ever planned to fall.
“You’re just too weak,” Fern laughed at him.
But the next day Fern walked over to the tree, running her finger over the scar her brother had left. It looked smaller somehow, but that had to be impossible, right? Trees were trees, not people, not magic. Just trees.
A few more years passed, and Fern grew even older, old enough now to leave her home for college and the real world. She barely came back home, and when she did, she would find Grandma Willow looking frailer and frailer each time.
Grandma Willow passed away her second year of college. She wasn’t home when it happened, but she came home as soon as she heard.
A week later, on the night before she was going to drive back to college, she took a walk around her family’s land, trying to savor as many memories as she could about her grandmother.
She stopped in front of a small tree, its branches tiny, its trunk thin. It seemed out of place in the middle of all these trees that were so thick she couldn’t even wrap her arms around them.
Something tickled her mind, and she leaned close to the tree.
“Grandma Willow, is that you?”
Nothing happened. Fern didn’t know what she was expecting. She pulled back, laughing at herself, glad no one else was around to see that embarrassing display. Her Grandma Willow had told her a lot of stories when she was growing up, but that’s what they were - stories. That’s what they had always been.
--
The years continued to pass, and Fern continued to grow older. She married and had children, two sons and daughter, and they too grew older and started families of their own. Sometimes she would tell her children and her grandchildren the stories her Grandma Willow had once told her, and she would pull out pictures of the tree that grew outside her bedroom window so they could see.
As she neared the end of her time of earth, Fern had one last thing she wanted to do. She asked her daughter to drive her back to the home she had grown up in, now home to one of her brother’s children, so she could see the tree beside her window one last time.
As her daughter went inside to see her cousin and his family, Fern walked, her steps now slow and wobbly, over to the tree.
There, she sat down, next to the tiny scar that was still left from her brother’s attempt to chop it down so very long ago, the same place she had once kicked it when she was small.
She leaned against the tree, closing her eyes.
“It is time now, Fern,” a voice inside her head whispered. “Are you ready?”
Fern thought she should be scared, or worried, but instead she felt nothing but calm and peace.
“I want to be right here, beside you, Rose, so I can see my children and their children and their children’s children.”
“If that is what you wish …”
“Yes, it is what I wish.”
“Then so it will be.”
--
She saw everything, just as Grandma Willow had said. And she knew everything, every life that had come before her, every life that would come after, all the joys, all the sorrows, all the pain, all the tears.
Some days, she would lift her branches into the air, let them wave as she looked down on the people she loved.
“The tree is smiling,” said two-year-old Lily, Fern’s great-granddaughter.
“Yes, it is,” agreed Willa, Fern’s granddaughter.
“I want to be a tree when I get older,” Lily said.
Fern watched her granddaughter, named after Grandma Willow, smile at Lily and then at Fern’s tree.
“If you’re lucky,” her granddaughter told Lily. “Then maybe someday you will be.”
Fiction. I thought there might be a lot of dark entries this week, based on the prompt, so I wanted to do something a little more lighthearted.
This was written for therealljidol Three Strikes Mini Season. If you liked my entry, please consider voting for me! You should also go read all the other amazing entries. You can find them all here. Voting should be up Saturday night!