Madeline sat in a chair by the window of the second story bedroom that had been hers as a child. She'd almost nodded off when the chainsaw roared again. Madeline opened her eyes and frowned. How could she fall asleep when those men outside were slicing her life into sections two feet long and stacking them in their truck?
She shook her head then. It was getting old that did that.
The tree was her life, well, at least a lot of her life had revolved around it. Her grandfather had dug that tree from a forest on his farm the day after she was born and had planted it beside the house. It had been slender and supple then, just a little thicker than a broomstick. When the wind blew, the tree yielded to the blast and shook a little, but straightened back up as soon as the wind stopped its assault.
It bent a little when she and her friends wrapped the trunk in ribbons for a maypole dance. She was six then. Madeline thought it odd she should remember something like that when that morning, she couldn't remember where she'd put her house slippers.
Yes, back then nothing seemed to be able to harm that tree. All the time she was growing up, it was still that way, just bending a little while the wind stripped a few leaves from the canopy of branches, and then standing back up, as tall as ever. It was like the tree laughed at the wind, laughed at the force it knew could never defeat it. She'd been like that too, back then.
Madeline looked out the window and saw the limb that reached almost to the window shake, then slowly begin to fall. It picked up speed, then a loud crack split the air as it broke from the main trunk and fell to the ground. Madeline felt the crack as if it had been one of her own bones breaking. That limb had been the way she sneaked from her bedroom to meet Jack the summer after they'd both turned eighteen and graduated from high school.
Jack would toss a pebble at her window to let her know he was there. Madeline would open her window and carefully step out onto that same limb. By holding on to the limb above it, she'd work her way to the trunk and then climb down. Back then, it had seemed easy, but then, back then she was strong, just like the trunk of the tree had become over the years.
She'd meet Jack under that tree and they'd spend an hour or two together before Madeline climbed back up the tree, edged out over the limb, and went back into her bedroom. By August, he didn't have to try to kiss her. As soon as her feet hit the ground, Madeline would throw her arms around his neck and kiss him until one of them had to stop in order to breathe.
Jack would always try to touch her, and after weeks of resisting when she really didn't want to, she let him slip his hand under her blouse. It was there, under that same tree that Jack had fondled her breast through her bra for the first time.
Jack had been so happy when he felt her small breast. Madeline had felt something else besides his hand. She'd felt a stirring deep inside her body, the stirring her mother had warned her about. Madeline knew she should stop Jack, but she couldn't. All she could do was kiss him again and let the tingles of the kiss join the sensations from her breast and crash together in her tummy.
One night in October, Madeline's mother had knocked on her bedroom door. They'd talked for a while about what Madeline was going to do now. Then her mother smiled.
"I got you a key so you wouldn't have to climb up and down that tree every night. There were a couple of times I was afraid you'd fall. If you try that after it's snowed, you will."
Madeline's mouth fell open.
"You knew about that and you didn't try to stop me?"
Her mother had touched her hand.
"Maddy, I was your age once, and I remember how it feels. You promised me you wouldn't do anything you'd regret later. I did watch you and Jack sometimes, and you didn't let him do anything I didn't let your father do before we were married. I knew I could trust you so I didn't do anything.
"Now that you're an adult, I know I can't stop you from doing what you want, and I know what you want to do. All I ask is be true to yourself and if you decide to sleep with Jack, make sure it's what you really want and that you don't end up pregnant before you're married."
Another sharp crack shook Madeline from the daydream as another branch fell to the ground. The men had waited until the limbs had dropped all their leaves and the tree was now just the gnarled skeleton of what had once been a thick, shading canopy taller than the house. As the men cut one twisted branch after another, it was like they were cutting off her own gnarled fingers. Age did that to both trees and people, she reflected, contorted once strong and straight into twisted and weak.
When she was nineteen and Jack had been drafted, she hadn't given aging a thought. All she thought about every day at the war plant and every night before she fell asleep was Jack, was he all right, and would he come home. The days couldn't go by fast enough. Now, it seemed like they'd just had Christmas and it was coming around again. I shouldn't be that way, thought Madeline. When you're young and have everything ahead of you, the days should go by fast. When you're old, they should slow down and give you more time to live.
The night before he boarded the train, she'd told Jack she wanted him to make her a woman, but Jack had stroked her face and smiled.
"Maddy, neither of us knows how this is going to turn out. I don't want to take that from you when I might not be able to come home and marry you."
Madeline had held him close for a long time that night, and the next morning, she'd run along the station platform beside the train window Jack leaned out of until the platform ended. As the train pulled away from town, Madeline had turned around with tears in her eyes and then driven back home.
Every evening when it was warm and light enough, she sat in a lawn chair under that tree and wrote letters to Jack. If it was light enough, she'd run her fingers over the heart with "Jack + Maddy" inside that Jack had carved into the trunk with his pocketknife. She'd remember that night, smile, and then begin writing how things had gone for her that day. She ended every letter with "Until you kiss me under the tree again, Love Maddy". She read Jack's letters under that tree every Sunday. He didn't have time to write more often, and Madeline would always wait until Sunday so she could read his letter more than once before having to do something else.
When it got cold, she'd sit in her bedroom to read his letters and to write to him. It wasn't the same as sitting under the tree where he'd kissed her the first time, but she could look out the window and see the branches, naked and sometimes with white lines of snow, and remember.
Four years took forever to end, but Jack did come home. She met him at the station, and when he stepped off the train, Madeline smothered him with kisses and wet the shoulder of his uniform with her tears. Two weeks later, when Jack had found a job, he proposed while she sat in the same lawn chair where she'd written all her letters. They had a short honeymoon at a hotel a few miles away, and it was in that hotel room Madeline had finally given herself to Jack.
Madeline smiled as the chainsaws stopped while the men loaded the small branches into their truck. Looking back, it was funny, that first night they were together as man and wife. Neither one really knew what they were doing. Jack would just try something and then ask Madeline if it felt good. Most of what he did was good, good enough that Madeline had been eager for him to kneel between her upraised thighs and make that first thrust that would end the girl and begin the woman.
