What Light

CHAPTER TWO

The sun barely peeks up from behind the hills when I park Dad’s truck on the side of the muddy access road. I set the emergency brake and look out on one of my favorite views. The Christmas trees begin a few feet from the driver’s side window and continue for over a hundred acres of rolling hills. On the other side of the truck, our field continues just as far. Where our land ends on either side, more farms carry on with more Christmas trees.

When I turn off the heater and step outside, I know the cold air is going to bite. I pull my hair into a tight ponytail, tuck it down the back of my bulky winter jacket, bring the hood over my head, and then pull the drawstrings tight.

The smell of tree resin is thick in the wet air, and the damp soil tugs at my heavy boots. Branches scratch at my sleeves as I pull my phone from my pocket. I tap Uncle Bruce’s number and then hold the phone against my ear with my shoulder while I pull on work gloves.

He laughs when he answers. “It sure didn’t take you long to get up there, Sierra!”

“I wasn’t driving that fast,” I say. In truth, taking those turns and sliding through mud is way too fun to resist.

“Not to worry, honey. I’ve torn up that hill plenty of times in my truck.”

“I’ve seen you, which is how I knew it would be fun,” I say. “Anyway, I’m almost at the first bundle.”

“Be there in a minute,” he says. Before he hangs up, I can hear the helicopter motor start to turn.

From my jacket pocket, I remove an orange mesh safety vest and slip my arms through the holes. The Velcro strip running down the chest holds it in place so Uncle Bruce will be able to spot me from the air.

From maybe two hundred yards ahead, I can hear chainsaws buzz as workers carve through the stumps of this year’s trees. Two months ago, we began tagging the ones we wanted cut down. On a branch near the top we tied a colored plastic ribbon. Red, yellow, or blue, depending on the height, to help us sort them later while loading the trucks. Any trees that remain untagged will be left to continue growing.

In the distance, I can see the red helicopter flying this way. Mom and Dad helped Uncle Bruce buy it in exchange for his help airlifting our trees during the harvest. The helicopter keeps us from wasting land with crisscrossing access roads, and the trees get shipped fresher. The rest of the year, he uses it to fly tourists along the rocky coastline. Sometimes he even gets to play hero and find a lost hiker.

After the workers ahead of me cut four or five trees, they lay them side-by-side atop two long cables, like placing them across railroad tracks. They pile more trees on top until they’ve gathered about a dozen. Then they lace the cables over the bundle and cinch them together before moving on.

That’s where I come in.

Last year was the first year Dad let me do this. I knew he wanted to tell me the work was too dangerous for a fifteen-year-old girl, but he wouldn’t dare say that out loud. A few of the guys he hires to cut the trees are classmates of mine, and he lets them wield chainsaws.

The helicopter blades grow louder—thwump-thwump-thwump-thwump—slicing through the air. The beat of my heart matches their rhythm as I get ready to attach my first bundle of the season.

I stand beside the first batch, flexing my gloved fingers. The early sunlight flashes across the window of the helicopter. A long line of cable trails behind it, dragging a heavy red hook through the sky.

The helicopter slows as it approaches, and I dig my boots into the soil. Hovering above me, the blades boom. Thwump-thwump-thwump-thwump. The helicopter slowly lowers until the metal hook touches the needles of the bundled trees. I raise my arm over my head and make a circular motion to ask for more slack. When it lowers a few more inches, I grab the hook, slip it beneath the cables, and then take two large steps back.

Looking up, I can see Uncle Bruce smile down at me. I point at him, he gives me a thumbs-up, and then up he goes. The heavy bundle pulls together as it lifts from the ground, and then it sails away.

A crescent moon hangs over our farmhouse. Looking out from my upstairs window, I can see the hills roll off into deep shadows. As a child, I would stand here and pretend to be a ship’s captain watching the ocean at night, the swells often darker than the starry sky above.

This view remains constant each year because of how we rotate the harvest. For each tree cut, we leave five in the ground and plant a new seedling in its place. In six years, all of these individual trees will have been shipped around the country to stand in homes as the centerpiece of the holidays.

Because of this, my season has different traditions. The day before Thanksgiving, Mom and I will drive south and reunite with Dad. Then we’ll eat Thanksgiving dinner with Heather and her family. The next day we’ll start selling trees from morning to night, and we won’t stop until Christmas Eve. That night, exhausted, we’ll exchange one gift each. There isn’t room for many more gifts than that in our silver Airstream trailer—our home-away-from-home.

Our farmhouse was built in the 1930s. The old wooden floors and stairs make it impossible to get out of bed in the middle of the night without making noise, but I stick close to the least creaky side of the stairs. I’m three steps from the kitchen floor when Mom calls to me from the living room.

“Sierra, you need to get at least a few hours of sleep.”

Whenever Dad’s not here, Mom falls asleep on the couch with the TV on. The romantic side of me wants to believe their bedroom feels too lonely when he’s gone. My nonromantic side thinks falling asleep on the couch makes her feel rebellious.

I hold my robe around me and slip my feet into tattered sneakers by the couch. Mom yawns and reaches for the remote control on the floor. She turns off the TV, which blackens the room.

She clicks on a side lamp. “Where are you going?”

“To the greenhouse,” I say. “I want to bring the tree in here so we don’t forget it.”

Rather than loading our car the night before we leave, we place all of our bags near the front door so we can look them over one more time before the drive. Once we hit the highway, the road ahead is too long to turn back.

“And then you need to go right to bed,” Mom says. She shares my curse of not being able to sleep if I’m worried about something. “Otherwise, I can’t let you drive tomorrow.”

I promise her and close the front door, pulling my robe tighter to keep out the cold night air. The greenhouse will be warm, but I’ll be inside only long enough to grab the little tree, which I recently transplanted into a black plastic bucket. I’ll put that tree by our luggage and then Heather and I will plant it after dinner on Thanksgiving. This will make six trees, which started on our farm, that now grow atop Cardinals Peak in California. The plan for next year has always been to cut down the first one we planted and give it to Heather’s family.

That’s one more reason this can’t be our last season.