The first thing I saw was the light. There had never been light on that side of the hill, not in my whole married life, and now the sun came straight through.
I stopped my pickup at the bottom of the skid road and sat with both hands on the wheel. Colby was asleep in the back seat. Tanner had his earbuds in and was looking at his phone.
Then Tanner looked up, and he pulled one earbud out, and he did not say anything for a long time.
“Mom,” he finally said. “Where did the trees go?”
Twenty-two acres of Douglas fir were gone from the face of the ridge. What was left was stumps, raw and pale, and slash piled in long brown windrows, and ruts where the yarder had dragged the logs down.
Those were Grandpa’s trees. More than that, they were the boys’ trees, because Grandpa had left all eighty acres to Tanner and Colby when he died two winters before.
Grandpa was Brody’s grandfather, not mine, but I had loved him like my own. He was the one who walked the boys up that hill every summer and told them the name of every tree they passed.
He had planted that stand himself after the old growth was logged off in the eighties. He used to say those firs were his savings account and his church at the same time.
In his will he left the land to his great-grandsons, and he named Brody to manage it until they were grown. It made sense on paper. Brody was their father. Brody knew timber.
I had not thought for one minute that Brody would cut it.
I woke Colby gently, and the three of us walked up the skid road in the drizzle. Nobody talked. The ground smelled like cut sap and wet bark, a smell I knew from twenty years in the timber business.
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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