from The Tree Plan
1.
In medieval times persons found guilty of being a public nuisance would be strapped to a stool and submerged in a river, and Kate could think of a few people in this town who would be excellent candidates for ducking, starting with the woman who for the third time this week was protesting the municipal dredging project on the neighborhood listserv because she believed it might threaten stray cats who could fall into the deepened creek and drown. Kate was tired of pretending that any of this made sense, that if she went so far as to type out a reply to this woman suggesting that a better means of flood mitigation would be for the city to seize her house through eminent domain, demolish it, and widen the creek, it was a sign that Kate was by no means a rational self, but rather a gallery of many selves, some of splendor and some of viciousness and some of disconsolate ruin. Some days, Kate swore this job made her feel like her only purpose in life was to chip away at this bloodiness within her until all that was left was one sweet smile, one cheerful word, since it seemed to be her fate as the only woman serving in senior leadership in the Corinth Department of Public Works to be mysteriously burdened with the task of public relations, so that, more often than not, she was the one among her colleagues who got stuck sending the emails which said things like I appreciate hearing from you and Thank you for your feedback and I understand your frustration, empty nuggets of rhetorical conciliation designed to maximally defuse tension with the public, when all Kate felt, day in and day out, was tension with the public. Just once, she would have liked to send a forceful, honest reply. To this idiot woman, protesting the flood control plan because she was worried about stray cats falling into the creek, when Kate guessed this woman didn’t have the foggiest clue what a 100-year flood would mean for her neighborhood—Kate pictured the floodwaters rising rapidly, the currents eating away at crumbling foundations, carrying away worm-eaten porches, whole sides of houses—but, of course, Kate didn’t hit send on the snarky reply about eminent domaining this woman’s house; it stayed in her email drafts; instead, she found herself typing: Dear Margaret, I appreciate your concern for the small animals of our city, but I am confident that the construction of the proposed six-foot floodwalls along the creek will provide an adequate protective barrier for the cats.
This was why Kate was involved with this project, because of the floodwalls. Because the construction of the floodwalls would require clear-cutting a dense swath of forsythia which lined the banks of the creek, and as the Deputy Director of Parks & Forestry for the City of Corinth, Kate had been looped in to handle any controversy that might be triggered by the forsythia’s removal. Already a group had formed, CAFE, Citizens Against Forsythia Eradication. The forsythia, its gold-tipped glory, its weeping hallucinatory splendor set against the backdrop of late spring snow melting in ditches and parking lots, Kate got it, she really did, and yet somehow, in the dozen or so emails she had already exchanged this morning with the members of CAFE, delving into such topics as forsythia relocation strategies and the question of whether the forsythia could be granted special status as “the official flower of Corinth,” thus engendering its protection, she had somehow failed to get across one thing, one especially important thing: her great love for forsythia. For indeed, if pressed, she might say that the forsythia blooming sweetly on the banks of the creek each spring was her only homeland. She might say that a landscape could take up lodging in the soul. She might say that a decade ago, as a graduate student in this city, she would sit on a warm spring day outside a coffeeshop along the creek and casually lift her eyes from the book she was reading (she had time for reading back then, before the job, before marriage and motherhood), and she would zero in on the yellow strands of forsythia cascading down the creekbank, and if she squinted her eyes just right, she could let the scene dissolve into an impressionistic wash of sunlight and water and bright dazzling color, and just for a moment, she could pretend that she wasn’t looking at an Upstate New York college town in the throes of a decades-long manufacturing crisis, with an eroded property-tax base and a downgraded credit rating. She was looking at what the city might become: walkable, beautiful, urbane. She flattered herself that she saw the city’s potential much the way that a sculptor staring at a block of marble might see the ghostly outlines of a statue shimmering in the rock, and the thought would occur to her, what if she stayed on after graduating, what if she got a job here, in a local architecture firm or the city planning department, what if instead of doing what her classmates were doing and moving to New York City or Boston or Seattle, she settled down in this small city where a young woman fresh out of grad school with a degree in landscape architecture and a thesis on urban forestry might make her mark: this is what the forsythia meant to her, this and so much more.
2.
But today the most pressing matter facing Kate was the question of how to fill the three hours of uninterrupted time that she had carved out to work on her Tree Plan. The Master Plan, Inventory, and Arboreal Guidelines for the City of Corinth, New York was displayed before her, an open document on her computer screen. It was a problem that she was barely at the halfway mark. She had exhausted the patience of her supervisors. She had blown past the deadlines set by the Corinth Street Tree Advisory Commission (CSTAC). She was doing her best to concentrate. She was visualizing the porous openings of tree pits. She was pondering the width of canopies. She was working through the minimum spacing necessary to maintain a healthy urban tree stock, the proximity of plantings to stop signs, utility poles, and fire hydrants.
But whereas she had holed herself up in her home office this morning with the intention of focusing on this one thing, she was now finding that she was thinking of many things. She was thinking of her three-month-old daughter, Lily, who was asleep on the floor a few feet away, seated in the instrument that Kate had nicknamed the Swing of Neglect, with its whirring motor, its gentle rocking motion and its soothing sounds designed to lull a baby into a state of blissful quietude. She was thinking of the strangeness of the orange sky that was visible through the window. She was thinking of her husband, Todd, who at this moment was standing in an 800-square-foot former autobody shop on the other side of town and cooking an IPA mash in a large stainless-steel vessel, for no money. She was thinking of the perils of best-laid plans, of unforeseen setbacks, of the brewery which Todd was trying to launch, but which was still not open for business; how the brewery, as Todd explained it, consisted of two elements, making the stuff and selling the stuff, and how the one relied on the other—Kate was no entrepreneur, it was true, but even she, with her simple arborist’s brain, could grasp the importance of making the stuff leading to the critical step of selling the stuff—and yet there was one scenario that Todd, for all his business acumen, had failed to foresee, and this was the scenario in which the city approved the brewery for production (making the stuff) but held up the tasting room (selling the stuff) in a morass of code review which had stretched on for months now, with no end in sight, a seemingly endless back-and-forth with the Corinth Building Department on the compliance of various walkways and walls and points of egress. She was thinking that her patience with this business wasn’t inexhaustible, that it might run out at any moment, that in fact her patience had already reached a very low threshold with this arrangement, which had seemed like a manageable idea a few weeks ago but which now seemed like the height of insanity, this lifehack, as Todd had called it, that would save thousands of dollars in daycare costs, whereby Kate would spend her mornings looking after their infant daughter while simultaneously trying to do her job from home, thus freeing up time for her husband to stand in an 800-square-foot former autobody shop on the other side of town and cook an IPA mash in a large stainless-steel vessel, for no money.
She was thinking how funny it was that things which seemed to be one way in the abstract had a habit of turning out to be another way in reality, for instance, in the abstract Kate would have said that her infant daughter was a precious child, a good child, the type of easygoing baby who, if you fed her three ounces of formula and set her down in a mechanically bobbing Swing of Neglect and inserted a pacifier into her mouth, could reasonably be expected to sleep for a period of time sufficient for Kate to complete her Tree Plan in a distraction-free environment. This is how it had seemed to Kate, in the abstract, when her husband had approached her a few weeks earlier with this idea, whereby Kate would watch the baby in the mornings, while she worked on the Tree Plan, and Todd would work in the brewery—building up the inventory, as he put it. They had talked it over; it had seemed correct. Whereas now in reality Kate was discovering that she had perhaps not thought this through very carefully. They did not appear so gracious, in hindsight, the things she was willing to sacrifice for love. It was perhaps a bridge too far, the task of juggling, here in the confines of her home office, the care of a baby, the writing of her unfinished Tree Plan, and the answering of an endless slew of ridiculous emails, so that her morning felt like a ticking time bomb that might blow up in her face at any moment. She was thinking that something had to give. She was thinking of the faces of lovers who had disappeared. She was thinking, as always, of Corinth, a city of 50,000 people in Upstate New York, how her life could have taken her anywhere, really—Berlin, Tokyo, Istanbul—but instead she had chosen to call this place home.
She was thinking of all these things, but chiefly this morning she was preoccupied by the question of the forsythia, why it blazed so brightly in her memory. Those yellow flowers: did they signal a happier time? Because it was true that lately what Kate seemed to notice were the city’s flaws: the construction cranes that wheeled like predatory birds against the evening sky, the unleashed dogs, the flooded basements, the crumbling retaining walls, the roads that buckled and broke in the winter freeze, the burned-out streetlights, the emergency measures used to secure the ancient parking garage which gave the impression that the entire structure was held together by skinny yellow straps which looked like they were purchased at Home Depot. Signs of entropy, everywhere Kate looked these days, but of course she couldn’t rule out the possibility that she was experiencing the distorting effects of nostalgia; it was entirely possible that her memories of the sparkling air and the forsythia shining on the creekbank were idealized images detached from a more sordid general reality; the city had been far from perfect in her younger days, she realized; there were burned-out streetlights and crumbling bridges and flooded basements back then too; really, it was entirely plausible that the city was mostly the same, actually, and it was just Kate who had changed, grown older, grayer, crankier, not young anymore, saddled by encroaching middle age, more sensitive to the warps and cracks of time; this was the most likely explanation for her peevishness, she had to admit, but no matter how many times she reminded herself of all this, no matter how diligently Kate applied the pincers of reason to her memory and told herself that the flaws she saw everywhere were more than likely the result of a change within her rather than a change within her environment, it made no difference, they still bothered her, the flaws, stubborn disorders of the municipal body which threatened to burrow into her, like the little brown mole on her left forearm which occasionally hurt and which she worried might turn cancerous.
Annoyances which she would have brushed off a decade ago now caused her toxic levels of distress, like the passive-aggressive email which had appeared in her inbox this morning from the new Director of Code Enforcement (the same person, incidentally, who was holding up Todd’s tasting room application), responding to her repeated inquiries about tree plantings at a local construction site: Kindly refrain Kate, he had written, from asking multiple individuals at different departments about varying aspects of the code as it relates to the proposed development. Kindly refrain, Kate typed, from being a fucking tool. Another email that would stay in drafts. And what did all these distractions amount to this morning, except to reinforce the fear (probably an irrational fear but a real fear nonetheless) that if she failed in this one crucial task of completing her Tree Plan, it would mean the work of her life was ruined? As it happened, she was so bogged down with interruptions this morning that she had only managed to write nineteen words in the half hour since Lily had fallen asleep, nineteen little words, based on research, planting of bare-root trees in the fall should continue to be the main method of planting, this was it, all she had managed to get down on the page in the half hour since her daughter had fallen asleep, and she couldn’t expect many opportunities like this, it was incredible, a full half hour of unbroken sleep showing no signs of abating, and she was wasting it (again, Kate highlighted the sentence on the Microsoft Word document, checking the wordcount, and saw with dismay that the number came to nineteen), and she was only on page eleven, she was still working through the planting guidelines, ahead of her still lay the tree inventories, the real meat and substance of this exercise, the fulfillment of Kate’s careerlong ambition of transforming the City of Corinth into a living museum of street trees that would bloom spectacularly each spring, the delineation of the tree species that Kate was carefully selecting not just for their aesthetic appeal but for their resistance to disease and invasive pests and their adaptability to climate change, the native species (red maple, flowering dogwood, hackberry, redbud, American hornbeam), the non-native species (gingko, Crimean linden, Cornelian cherry, European beech, Turkish filbert), so that decades from now, if humanity hadn’t been decimated by climate change or nuclear catastrophe, the residents of this city might stroll down the sidewalk beneath Kate’s trees in the warm May sunshine and feel their hearts soar at the sight of the colorful blossoms hanging in the canopy overhead.
This was her dream. She was a professional. She knew what needed to be done. But she couldn’t understand why her self-discipline had abandoned her this morning. Why she was so incapable of focusing on the task at hand. Because no sooner had she written the words bare-root trees than a restless impulse caused her eyes to wander from the draft of her Tree Plan and migrate to the Swing of Neglect, to check on Lily. And from there, Kate’s eyes were compelled to turn to her email inbox, where she discovered a complaint about the forsythia, or a complaint about the stray cats. They were hardly emergencies, the plight of the forsythia, the plight of the stray cats, and yet Kate couldn’t resist emailing a reply right away; to Margaret from the neighborhood listserv, for instance, to reassure her that the stray cats would not be drowning in the creek (this same Margaret, who, it was true, Kate was fantasizing about strapping to a stool and ducking in a river), and yet it couldn’t be denied, as much as there was an annoyance, there was also a certain pleasure in writing to Margaret from the neighborhood listserv, because it allowed Kate the privilege of forgetting about the Tree Plan for a moment. Was she losing her mind? What was happening to her brain? If she couldn’t focus, if she couldn’t make progress this morning, she worried that all her work would amount to nothing. The brown bag luncheons, the invited panels and public talks, all the hours presenting to the City Council and coordinating the volunteer teams of Citizen Pruners who spanned out across the city each May and June, all the time corresponding with the random city residents, like Mr. Sawyer on Third Street, who sent her an email anytime a city tree was scheduled for removal, Kate, he wrote, why must the trees be cut down, and it didn’t matter how many times Kate explained to Mr. Sawyer that just like a person, a tree had a lifespan, that trees got old, they got sick, they dropped dead branches on houses, cars, people, no matter how many times Kate explained to him that the tree needed to be removed to protect public safety and that for every tree that was cut down the city planted two new trees, Mr. Sawyer still wrote to her to ask her why the trees must be cut down, every time, but Kate didn’t mind because she secretly had a soft spot for Mr. Sawyer, who seemed to think that trees were immortal: even all those emails to poor Mr. Sawyer, she could honestly say, it all led back to that vision of forsythia on the creek, all those years ago.
3.
Was Kate a bad mother? Would Lily grow up to resent her? Was she already journeying down the path of doing damage to her daughter? From the desk where she sat, she could trace a line, a line that started at the pink ridge of Lily’s cheek and ran across the floor to the ledge of the windowsill, and the further that Kate moved her eye along the trajectory of this imaginary line, the less certain she was of her daughter’s wellbeing. If she kept her focus on Lily’s sleeping face, she could say with confidence that she was mothering in a correct way, but as soon as she shifted her gaze to take in the perspective of the wider room, she was less sure.
Through the window, Kate could see the sky, which was stained a deep ochre from the smoke of the Canadian wildfires which had been raging all summer, and the sight of that wild sky frightened her. And closer at hand, on her desk, were the instruments of her working life, which were equally troubling in their own way: her open notebooks, her computer on which was displayed the unfinished draft of the Tree Plan, and her phone. If there was one object that embodied the forces of distraction that threatened to pull Kate away from her baby, it was that phone; such an unassuming device, a sleek little rectangle that could fit in the palm of her hand, and yet Kate found it astonishing how much power it wielded over her life, its flashes and buzzes rerouting her attention throughout the day to texts, emails, calendar appointments, emergency reports warning of road closures or police activity, or notifications announcing yet another of the vapid videos glamorizing the lives of stay-at-home moms that were always showing up on her Facebook feed; Kate could think of a million other videos that she’d rather be watching, videos of stand-up comedians, or of dogs performing funny tricks, or of ospreys divebombing for fish, literally any other content would have been preferable, but for some reason the algorithm kept flooding her feed with these videos, and Kate couldn’t resist watching them; videos of mothers who were (it had to be said) younger and prettier than she was, who never seemed stressed, who never seemed tired, who weirdly were always outfitted in gingham or hemp, who seemed perpetually cheerful in the pursuit of their one highest task in life, which apparently was to stand in kitchens that resembled the bland interiors of suburban hotels and engage in various homemaking activities with their children; videos that seemed deliberately designed to attack Kate’s deepest insecurities, to make her feel that she was failing to live up to a manufactured ideal of motherhood, because it wasn’t lost on her that it was 8:45 on a Tuesday morning and she wasn’t baking gingerbread with Lily; she wasn’t churning ice cream or making pesto from garlic mustard that she had foraged in her yard; instead, she was doing her job. But neither was it entirely accurate to say that she was doing her job, because in the intervals between searching for the right word to describe a planting guideline or calculating the distance between driveway aprons, she was distracted by the presence of her baby at her feet.
Kate looked at Lily. She was still sleeping. Somewhere on Kate’s desk was the journal she had started keeping, in which she recorded her observations of Lily, quick jottings which she squeezed in between diaper changes and bottle feeds. There was something about the life of a baby which filled Kate with awe when she compared it to the complex behavior of an adult, when she considered that an adult human being could be plainspoken or obscure, could be tactful or oblivious, could be generous or scolding, could be sanctified or downright evil, could rocket to the heights of ecstasy or sink to the lowest depths of depravity, whereas an infant, on the other hand, was a simple creature composed of straightforward tendencies which Kate, with her analytic temperament, had broken down into a system of six modes of consciousness, which she recorded in her journal as the following: 1) a primary state of deep sleep, in which Lily would rest quietly without moving, which Kate had nicknamed SNOOZE; 2) a secondary state of restless sleep, in which Lily would thrash from side to side and startle at loud noises, which Kate had nicknamed SQUIRM; 3) a tertiary state of liminal drowsiness, in which Lily would yawn and roll her eyes back in her head, which Kate had nicknamed DOZE; 4) a quaternary state of agitated wakefulness, in which Lily would cry and move her body in a disorganized fashion, which Kate had nicknamed FUSS; 5) a quinary state of quiet wakefulness, in which Lily would lie inertly and gaze at her surroundings with wide-open eyes, which Kate had nicknamed CHILL; 6) a senary state of active wakefulness, in which Lily would wiggle her limbs and smile and coo at caregivers, which Kate had nicknamed HAPPY BABY. And while Kate, in her naivete, might have expected an infant to cycle through its various states of consciousness according to a sequential progression, and while it was indeed true that Lily would sometimes step from one adjacent state of consciousness to another (so that FUSS might pass through CHILL on its way to HAPPY BABY, for instance, or CHILL might pass through DOZE on its way to SNOOZE), what Kate was startled to discover, more typically, was that Lily’s mood would jump several steps in the series and arrive at a state of consciousness that was more distantly positioned on the spectrum, so that HAPPY BABY could devolve suddenly into SNOOZE, or SNOOZE could erupt chaotically into FUSS, which gave Kate the impression that Lily’s moods were haphazard and impossible to predict; with one notable exception, and this was the case in which Kate was able to induce an intentional state of SNOOZE, which also happened to be the technique she was relying on this morning to create a brief window of freedom in which to make progress on her Tree Plan.
She pictured the technique as a tripod, with each leg of the tripod corresponding to a sleep aid. One leg of the tripod was the Swing of Neglect, with its soothing noise and mechanized rhythms; the next leg of the tripod was a pink, translucent pacifier; and the final leg of the tripod was the brand of baby formula known as TummyEase™, which, in addition to containing the requisite supply of brain-boosting nutrients such as choline and docosahexaenoic acid, was the #1 brand of baby formula recommended by the pediatricians of America to reduce fussiness, gassiness, and crying in infants; and what Kate found was that in order to engineer an intentional state of SNOOZE in Lily, all three legs of the tripod had to be present and working together; say the Swing of Neglect and the TummyEase™ baby formula were present but there was no pacifier; or say the TummyEase™ baby formula and the pacifier were present but there was no Swing of Neglect; the tripod would teeter and fall; and even though the SNOOZE technique felt eerily to Kate like she was drugging her daughter (Was it wrong? Was she the worst mother in the world?), the liberty she was taking seemed more excusable when she considered it in light of the various stressors that were bearing down upon her life this morning; when she happened to glance out her window and shudder at the sight of that strange orange sky out there; when she pulled up the Air Quality Index on her computer and saw with alarm that the dial was continuing its steady push out of the red zone (unhealthy for sensitive groups) into the purple zone (unhealthy for everyone); when she considered that, out of all the distractions she was forced to reckon with this morning, the smoke-filled sky outside her window was the gravest, a bloody portent looming at the edge of her vision and seeping into her consciousness even as she struggled to devote her attention to the work on her computer screen. So that even when, in a triumph of focus, she managed to steady her gaze and place her hands on her keyboard and quickly type the next sentence of the Tree Plan (she was determined to make progress this morning), evergreens or large trees should be planted balled and burlapped in the spring, even as she wrote this sentence, the word evergreen opened up a vista in her mind, a sudden glorious hallucination of the northern woods; in her mind’s eye, she saw acres of black spruce, jack pine, tamarack; she saw dark drooping branches set against bright green carpets of feather moss; she saw clearings of bogland, and she saw flashes of songbirds in the trees; and then, slicing through the air, there came a finger of fire, returning for its yearly dance as it had done for millennia, picking its way through the debris and dead timber, igniting the dried-out ends of the forest, purifying, cleansing, restoring, except that now before her eyes the finger of fire seemed to grow into a terrifying column burning with an intense, demonic heat, like the furnace wrath of an angry god, sucking up all organic matter into its vortex; in her vision, the fire expanded its circumference; it spread vast distances; it devoured boreal forests in Quebec, Alberta, the Northwest Territories; the forests were left to burn; whole towns were evacuated; the smokejumpers were forced to retreat; an execrable plume of smoke darkened the skies and drifted southwards over the Great Lakes and came to rest in the air outside Kate’s window; she permitted herself a quick peek at it once more; it blotted out the sun; it prompted Kate to recall that, for the past week or so, ever since that acrid orange haze had appeared in the summer sky, her mind had been filled with obsessive fears of fire, thoughts which came to her unbidden, at random times of day; how the previous evening, sautéing garlic on her stovetop, for instance, she had imagined the burner’s little blue flame shooting quick as an arrow over the kitchen countertop, crossing the floor, and engulfing the refrigerator in flames; or just yesterday morning, driving through a busy downtown intersection, she had caught sight of the smoke-filled sky in her sideview mirror, and suddenly she had been seized by a violent fantasy of the whole city catching fire, cars exploding, beams collapsing, flames shooting from upper-story windows, people screaming in anguish like a vision out of some terrible day of judgment, and she had imagined that it was her fate to move through this inferno forever wearing an oxygen mask and a forty-pound tank strapped to her back, crawling through the charred wreckage of her city, searching blindly, madly for signs of life.
And yet, a single glance at her sleeping daughter was all it took to banish Kate’s grief in an instant. All the poisonous deliriums of her morning were lifted by the sight of that tiny baby, lying on the floor of her office, sleeping so peacefully in the Swing of Neglect that she hardly looked real. Her perfect cheek, a cozy blanket tucked up against her chin, a bit of coral-pink lip protruding from behind her pacifier, every detail was wondrous, ethereal, like a cherub in a painting by Botticelli (or was it Raphael?), the soft halo of Lily’s face, nesting in the atmosphere of radiant calm that Kate had managed to instill in her home office this morning. Kate took it all in: the computer, the bookshelves, the messy desk with its assorted notebooks and files, her highbacked armchair with its memory foam cushion, the gentle purring of the air purifier in the corner blending with the whirring of the Swing of Neglect, emitting a comforting hiss of white noise, so that Kate was unable to tell which noise belonged to the air purifier and which noise belonged to the Swing of Neglect; the gentle play of shadows on the rug; in spite of it all, in spite of the multiform disasters of this world, Kate thought, she had done it, she had carved out this little oasis of dignity and peace; and glancing at Lily once again, she had to say, no: it did not seem like she was doing damage. At least not yet.
Seph Murtagh is a writer living in Ithaca, NY. His fiction and essays have appeared in 3:AM Magazine, minor literature[s], Socrates on the Beach, and the Missouri Review. He is a past winner of the Jeffrey E. Smith Editors Prize from the Missouri Review, and his work has been cited as notable in Best American Essays.