Delicious Trees by Miriam Gershow

Fiction

Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

The thing I don’t remember is leaves. It’s been winter forever, branches bare, limbs naked. There’s ice on snow on ice. Gray slosh. Needles hold on the fir trees, but needles aren’t the same as leaves. One day when Lucas was a toddler, he came from preschool and said, “Mama, the trees are deliciousness” and I thought he was a poet. A wiseman. He’d meant deciduous. For years I quoted him back to himself: 

“Delicious trees,” when we were driving or at a swing set. Or camping in the forest.

Last time I saw Lucas, the scabs on his cheeks had mostly healed. When he hugged me, there was some fat on his bones. Some soft. “The trees are deliciousness,” I said in his ear. It was springtime, the leaves green and dewy. Everything new again, reborn, the sun the kind of sun that defrosts your skin, your eyes so easy to water in its glare.

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Author's Note:

As a child, I loved the watery isolation of a bath, my undisturbed world of one in a household that was a scritchy fit at best. As an adult, this house—the family I’ve made—fits me. Yet still, the tub. Only the worst of my chronic pain resists warm water. The bath is a daily reset. After, I can step over the lip of the tub, back into the world, a version of new.

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Miriam Gershow is the author of Closer, Survival Tips: Stories and The Local News. She is the recipient of a Fiction Fellowship from the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, an Oregon Literary Fellowship, and is a two-time finalist for the Oregon Book Award. 

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