Sawdust
The realtor forgot to tell me about the house under the house. It was a Tuesday and I walked through the door into a maroon room with a walnut table at its center. Oak floors, the realtor said. Probably original, from the 1960’s. She couldn’t remember the hands that went into digging the foundation, planing the studs, pouring the concrete. Just as I failed to inquire about who had lived here before I did, who trotted along the noisy boulevard two blocks west, before cars, before asphalt, before wagons, just dirt, feet, and horses.
The bones of my house are made of pine, but there is more to remember. Those mountains they grew inside, their sugary phloem, burrowed roots, and monoecious cones.
More than what their bodies once were, I remember what they became for my comfort. With blades their trunks were fractured. They all landed in a deafening thud. Pulled from their family, they were dismembered, lobbed, dragged by tractors, piled onto trucks, then shipped to the mill, for stripping.
I remember the wooden walls of my house keeping the rain out and the warmth in. I don’t remember their fissures and crevices housing spiders or bats or crested tits.
My childhood house was all wood. The furniture too. Daily, trees buzzed through my father’s miter saw. He built koa tables and cherry thresholds and when he was finished, he blew away the dust. He never told me about howler monkeys swinging from a yellow elder or banyan roots squeezing life back into Angkor’s temples. Or the 4000-year-old bristlecone pine that held on when others couldn’t. I don’t remember asking him about photos of men sitting inside the gash of a redwood tree and where all of its life had been drained into.
Hiding in mahogany closets, this I remember. And getting onto my hands and knees to sniff fir floors for lost Lincoln logs. I don’t remember what shade the sky was the day the trees came down. Or the rabbits and squirrels that fled.
Felicity Fenton’s stories and essays have been featured in Fanzine, Split Lip Press, Wigleaf, Iowa Review, Pidgeonholes, Denver Quarterly, Masters Review, Passages North, X-R-A-Y, Northwest Review, New Delta Review, Pank, and others. Read more.