The Pair Tree

We were driving the fruit loop, a side route of county roads you could take from the state highway that wound through the foothills of the mountains and a patchwork of family farms. Signs sprung from the shoulder where dirt roads intersected the main drag. All of them displayed something like “U-Pick” or “Pick Your Own” or named the owner of the business. Some proprietors painted their barns with large letters, makeshift billboards proclaiming what plants you would find if you turned left here; lavender, pear trees, peach groves, berry brambles. Some advertised hand pies and homemade jellies, pumpkin butter, pickles, or cookies. One place even offered milk shakes.

My wife Claire sat placidly in the passenger seat. A box was on her lap, and her left hand rested on the center of it. Her right elbow was on the doorframe at the base of the window. And her right hand held her chin as she stared taciturnly out the passenger side window. The radio was turned down low, but occasionally, the ethereal voice of an NPR host would seem to come out of nowhere, as if to punctuate the hum of the engine and the sound of the wheels on pavement.

I pressed the brakes lightly. As we gently decelerated, I activated the turn signal. Claire raised her head from her palm to glare at me and pointed to the upcoming road on the right. “It’s this one,” she said as I turned the wheel and the tires crunched onto gravel. I drove past the driveways of a farm on the left and another on the right. The road started to incline slightly and led us around a curve, causing the main highway to be lost to our rearview mirror. Another turn in the other direction and the road straightened out. We drove along for another quarter mile before we could see the pair tree.

We didn’t know if that’s what the locals called it, but it seemed apropos, a towering tree on the side of the road with many thick branches broadly extending from the bole. A number of pairs of shoes with their laces tied together into knots hung from nearly every limb. The lowest branches were thick with footwear while the uppers were sparsely shod. I slowed the vehicle and edged over to the side of the road. There wasn’t a ditch or culvert here, the shoulder sloped gently into the field, so I drove the car right up to the tree, the front wheels even with the trunk.

I turned off the car, but left the keys in the ignition. Claire exited the vehicle and placed the box on the hood of the car. She took the top off the box, took out a pair of shoes, replaced the lid, and set the shoes on the box. I got out of the car, stretched my arms above my head, and walked around in circles, pumping my knees high to loosen the kinks in my legs that set in during the drive.

Meanwhile, Claire busied herself with the shoes. She started by pulling the laces from out of the eyelets until they only remained threaded through the two on each shoe at the base of the tongue. Then, she pulled upward with one aglet until it drew even with the other. Next, she tied the laces of each shoe together into a knot before, finally, tying the laces of the shoes together.

“Here,” she said as she tossed the shoes to me.

“Do you just want me to throw them up?”

“What do you think?” She aimed a cold glare and a scowl in my direction.

I shrugged my shoulders and looked up into the tree. I held onto one shoe and threw it with an overhand motion towards the branches. The pair of shoes fell to the ground a couple feet in front of me. Claire snorted. I picked up the shoes again. This time, I held onto one shoe while spinning the other in a circle. I released the pair and it flew upward. The laces caught on a low branch and the shoes wrapped around it. I held my hands out and smiled triumphantly.

“They’re not high enough,” Claire said querulously.

I looked up at the branch holding the shoes. I couldn’t quite reach the lower shoe, even when standing on tiptoe. I jumped up and swatted the shoe, hoping I could disentangle the laces from the branch. The shoe wrapped itself another time around the tree limb, out of reach, now, even if I jumped.

“Are we okay?” I asked Claire.

She raised her eyes to look at the shoes, one of them hanging barely an inch lower than the branch. Then, Claire looked directly at me and exhaled loudly. She crossed her arms and walked towards the tree looking up into the branches. “Come here.” Claire pointed up. “Look! Those branches are thick. They’ll hold your weight.”

I walked over to where my wife stood and peered into the branches. I reached my hand up to see how high on the trunk I could reach.

“Use the car to climb up. Don’t be stupid.”

Stepping first on the tire, then the hood of the car, I was able to reach a branch hanging over the vehicle. I wrapped my hands around the branch and walked up the trunk until I could curl my legs around the limb. Using another branch, I pulled myself up and maneuvered myself around the trunk to the branch with the shoes. I shimmied out just enough so I could unwrap the shoes and drape them around my neck.

Claire stood at the base of the tree, looking at me, hands on hips, frowning. She raised her arms and flicked her wrists upward, goading me to climb further. “What are you waiting for? Go on! Looks easy!”

I took a deep breath and fixed my gaze on the center branch that grew upward from the trunk, eventually tapering into nothing. Slowly, I stepped on progressively higher branches, rotating around the center as if walking up a precarious spiral staircase. A few more feet and I could feel the tree swaying due to my added weight. I took a breath.

“That’s probably high enough!” Claire shouted. I chanced a glance at the ground and saw her looking up, her hands making binoculars over her face. I wrapped one arm around the center branch, grabbed one of the shoes with my other hand and removed them from around my neck.

I held that one little shoe in front of me. The whole thing was barely bigger than my palm. And I though of the soft fleshy foot that used to fill that shoe.

I found the thickest limb growing out from the central branch and reached my arm out as far as I could. Dangling one shoe along one side it, I carefully wrapped the other shoe around it once.

Slowly, I made my way down, holding tightly with both hands to the center branch, lowering myself and feeling for purchase with my foot. Once I reached the level of the lowest limbs, I hung down from a branch, briefly, before letting go and dropping to the grass. Claire was sitting in the driver’s seat and had started the car. I opened the passenger side door and sat in the bucket seat.

“Daddy!”

I shut the door before turning around. “Hey, sleepyhead,” I cooed at my daughter. She sat in her booster seat, smiling and kicking her feet gaily. “Did you have a nice nap?”

“Yeah!” She giggled to herself. Claire put the car in gear and turned the wheel to steer us back onto the road. She made a disheartened grunt as the car creaked forward, straining against the tightness of the turn needed to get us pointed in the right direction. Once we were on the road, Claire cleared her throat and turned the radio up.

“Daddy?” my little girl asked from the back seat. I twisted around to face her. “Why do people throw their shoes in trees?”

“I don’t know, baby.” I smiled at her, grabbed her feet, shod in new sneakers, with my hands and shook them. “I just don’t know.”