The Mother
“Hello, old friend,” I said. It had been 40 years since we parted ways. I stood in the afternoon sun by the side of the road, with my outstretched hand softly touching her craggy bark. Her thick, green lower bows used to touch the ground and shelter me when I was eight and nine years old. I could vaguely make out the grey rounds in the bark where lower limbs had been severed long ago. I turned my face to the sky and saw her high needled branches, which now seemed so sparse that I barely recognized her. You’ve lost some branches too , she said. I smiled. Yes, I have. Sometimes I brought friends here with me when I was a child and we told secrets in the shade of her bows. Once a couple boys came with us and told us terrible, terrible things. “Girls bleed from their vaginas,” one of them said. All the girls gasped and exchanged looks of disgust and indignation. “What are you talking about?” I demanded. “That’s disgusting.” “You’re a virgin. That’s why you don’t know about it.”