The tree at the bottom of the hill was already dead before Mom's Sam left, for good this time, but Fran pointed out that the oak with its crooked limb looked like a guy flexing his bicep, the kind of thing Mom's Sam would do in the mirror after shaving the cream off his face when no one was watching, except for Fran and John who were too small to be noticed. After Fran's observation, the children decided to give the tree the man's name.

The first winter without him, Fran and John aimed their sleds straight for the oak named Sam and rammed it, again and again, swoop and slam, swoop and slam, which was fun until John got hurt. The first spring without the man, they watched ants march in and out of the holes that riddled the rotting trunk, and John, whose speech was bad, especially when he got excited or upset, lisped, "Sam could die," and Fran answered, "And we would never even know it." The first summer without the man named Sam, two enormous woodpeckers showed up every day to eat the dead oak's ants. They flew in with jungle laughs, red crests, white throats, and drummed away the hot silence of the midafternoons. Meanwhile, the grass grew long at the base of the tree, impossibly long, and prettiest at dawn, when dew sat on the blades like frost and soaked the kids to their thighs. The autumn after Sam left, while the woods reddened, the tree, just a shell of a tree, a ghost of a Sam, stayed stone gray, without a single leaf to dapple the ground. No leaf to quiver. No leaf to lose. Still, its crooked limb hooked great clouds out of the sky.

Fran figured, in a year or two, she would be big enough to jump and reach that arm. John thought, in a year or two, he'd be strong enough to climb the trunk and test the bent limb with his weight. And surely, by then, Fran would have learned to cartwheel. And John would have straightened out the th sound, even when he was very happy or very sad. And they both, at last, would have found the right words to say how they felt about their tree, their Sam, which was deader than dead yet more powerful than possible, standing mightier and taller than any god or man.

.

Read MO's postcard.





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