Landscape Variation
- Feb 18, 2022
- 3 min read
by Victoria Buitron
I can taste its green — not the fresh lemony taste of citrus — but the way you suck on a papercut and the iron surges with nutrients on the tongue. I’d always been surrounded by cement, the click-clack of hurried heels on pavement. But now The Tree, an American Sycamore in the front yard with a trunk in which four of me could snuggle within its circumference, towers over our home and aspirates all the evil eye sent our way. Red cardinals swoop by its branches in late May, squirrels chase each other and sound like weakling cats to confuse predators, and an almost albino cat leaves its scent by the roots.
In the heat of a stale August, a tornado touches land nearby and when I see the alert on my phone in the living room the first thing I think is tornadoes aren’t a thing in Connecticut, but I’m wrong. A shriek of a hurdle of human bones being broken at once. There’s nothing like the uprooting of old wood, which pains me more than the blow on the ground that quakes my skeleton. Josue grabs me right before the thump, and I become a ball underneath his torso, my face and knees touching while his body drapes me. When we realize it didn’t fall on the house but on the street — not hurting anything but itself — we stand by the windows until the clouds subside into a tepid sunset.
I stare at the lifted roots, long fingers of a skeletal witch, and I want to dig my own hands into the dirt underneath the emptiness, to feel the mush or hardness and follow the roots to see how long the wood continues. Josue and I can’t leave our street, move our cars, go to work — I grieve from the porch. The tree cutters and the utility pole workers come and make sure we don’t get electrocuted, and I stand in the same spot while wincing as it becomes mere slices of what it used to be. Someone comes to me with a hard hat and says: You have a chimney. Want the wood? I ask him what we need to do. We’ll leave it in small logs here in the driveway. It’ll cost — I don’t let him finish. Okay. Sure. Josue and I put on gloves, and I cradle the pieces as if they were babies, not worrying that it can stain my clothes, almost hoping a splinter breaches my skin so the tree and I can be one if only for some pained seconds.
Months later, when a pile of snow covers the street, the land healing under the fluff, Josue tells me to come sit by the fireplace and sip apple cider. I sit with him, my hands warm from the fire, and the sparks cannonade on the brass protection screen, and maybe it isn’t a coincidence I didn’t name The Tree, seeing slabs of what once relieved me from heat emanate embers.
Victoria Buitron is a writer and translator with an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from Fairfield University. Her work has been featured or is upcoming in SmokeLong en Español, Bending Genres, Lost Balloon, and other literary magazines. Her debut memoir-in-essays, A Body Across Two Hemispheres, will be released in 2022 by Woodhall Press.
