Pine Trees and Old Shoes

The forest was lonely. Tall pines reached upward and sun light was dissected into small thin rays cutting through the canopy leaving strange, irregular shapes of light on the forests orange pine needle floor. She was a lovely creature and knew the woods well. She walked barefoot and wore a white dress. Her brown hair curled to her shoulders and in her hands, she held an old pair of shoes.
As she walked she noticed how pollens floated in the light, disappeared into shade and reappeared in the light again; only a little further on.
Anna Bell was visiting her home. Her grandmother used to live in an old house in these woods. She grew up here. Her grandmother recently died and left the house to her. This was the first time she walked in any woods for years.
Anna Bell graduated high school in a small town called Almond. It was a one horse town in the Florida panhandle. From there, she moved to Atlanta on scholarship to attend Georgia State University. She excelled in communications, majored in Public Relations and ended up working for the highly respected firm Goldman Sachs in New York City. In the business, she was called, a spin manager.
Her career started smoothly. Everyone was making money. Most of her PR work was in human resources. Angry men and women occasionally called threatening, and berating her. They would blame the disasters in their lives on the bank. If their credit was too bad it was the banks fault. If their houses were foreclosed it was the banks fault. If they went into bankruptcy it was the banks fault. If they could not afford their lifestyle it was the banks fault.
She did not feel sympathy for these people. For one, most were well off before their financial problems arrived. The issues started after they already had wealth. For two, Anna Bell grew up poor, made money and had good credit. Whatever her guts told her about these people she always remained calm. It was her job and she got paid big bucks to remain composed and get these people off of Goldman Sachs back.
After all, the company treated her well. She was fully compensated for her stress and talents. She was a people person. She didn’t have to deal with advertising. The company used her to be a face customers could know personally. She was that good. She helped smooth out deals and take out the trash (people who were no longer profitable).
As years piled on she began to notice things though. She was taking out more and more trash and smoothing out fewer deals. Business deals she did publicity work for became shadier and shadier. She was provided with fewer details. The people she met with were changing. They were no longer the rich, irresponsible people who lived out of their means. The people she met became more and more normal. They increasingly seemed more and more like Anna Bell.
And of course, as many people know, the media started in on them. Goldman Sachs began to look very bad. There were things being reported that even disturbed Anna Bell. It seemed Goldman Sachs was taking advantage of people. Some of their actions could be deemed predatory. This should have been in opportunity for Anna Bell. She was a spin manager.
But it wasn’t. She was laid off. The PR people are always the first to go. And now she was here, back in the Florida panhandle a few miles west of Almond. Dust and seed pods kept floating in and out of broken sunlight. Dragon flies went about their business and all the frogs were sleeping.
After Anna Bell lost her job she found herself on a slow retreat south. It all started in New York City. She couldn’t keep up with the rent, she sold her company stock, she relied on credit cards more and more, she had to sell her car and so she left.
She was staying with an old girlfriend in Knoxville, Tennessee when she got the news of her grandmother’s death. She was devastated. They had a close relationship and talked often. Her death was sudden she seemed in perfectly good health. The doctors told Anna Bell her grandmother died peacefully in her sleep. A lawyer told Anna Bell her grandmother had left the house in the woods to her. The lawyer also told Anna Bell that the bank was foreclosing on her grandmother’s house unless Anna Bell could pay the mortgage. She could not.
And so she came here one last time. She had been here a week’s time going through her grandmother’s clutter and packed her small blue Chevy full of it. There was nothing more she could take. She pondered all this while walking on soft pine needles in the northern Floridian woods.
She stopped at a ledge. Part of the forest floor gave way in a mudslide a while back. She looked out onto a marshy plain. The rest of the ground and the trees still lay in a disoriented pile at the foot of the ledge. The marsh was encroaching.
The shoes she was holding in her hand belonged to her grandmother. They were brown leather, plain and worn but still functional. They were a sturdy pair of shoes. Her grandmother always used to tell her that her shoes would outlast any of Anna Bell’s new shoes. They were durable and not made to be replaced. They were simple and sturdy.
Anna Bell looked down at her own shoes. They were gray and ugly and covered in mud. The insole had fallen out and they weren’t even a year old. The laces were frayed at the tips. Her left shoe was in a knot that would never come undone.
She knelt down and pulled off the worn shoes bought not more than a year ago and hurled them into the marsh. Then she put on her grandmother’s shoes, walked back to her car and drove away, never to return to these woods.

The Morning After

We evacuated to northern Miami; to a place called Kendall. I remember coming out of a dark hall way. We saw through holes in the plywood into the backyard of their house. The pool was black. There was tar in it. The screened enclosure was a twisted mass of metal. It danced into the tar pit, through the air and seemed to look for the rest of its body.

The sky was still gray. Before the storm the sky was the most beautiful thing I could remember seeing. I have never seen a sky like I did the day before the storm. I asked my Dad, “What’s it going to be like?” “I don’t know,” he said. I kept asking. I thought I woke up early that day because my room was so dark but when I went outside the sun shined like it never had before. There was already plywood nailed in front of my bedroom window making my room dark.

But it was gray now. My Dad told me to come out front. I was eight and my sisters Liz and Rachel were six and two. I went out front. They stayed inside.

The house in Kendall was on a hill. It was a rich person’s house and their nice red tiles had blown away. Streets made valleys in this neighborhood. They became rivers. I saw a man in a flat boat float by. He had wild eyes and looked at us. We were on an island. He kept rowing. I have no idea where he went but there really wasn’t anywhere to go.

We drove a white Dodge minivan circa 1990 or 1989 or some year to the house in Kendall. All of its windows were busted out. The storm happened in 1992 and I remember finding glass between the cushions in that van in 1995. That’s the year we left Florida that year.

Everything was broken so we started clearing debris. We picked up the front door first and propped it in the door way. Every day we worked. My sisters blonde and brunette watched from holes in the walls.

There was still food and gas for the generator. The only way to occupy time was taking trees, metal, roofs, cars, branches, tiles, tires, stop signs, bits of metal, animal corpses, toilets, chairs, window frames, wet clothes, dolls, toys, photographs, memories and put them into giant piles that reached up to heaven. We burned those piles.

One day I was sweeping glass up. I stopped. I had started a collection of rusted bits of metal. They were easy to collect. I started looking for them and heard the chainsaws rev up. I went to watch my Dad and other men chainsaw a giant gumbo limbo tree into small pieces and throw them in the pile that reached to Heaven to be burned.

My Mom came to me then. “It’s too dangerous for you to be this far away from the house,” she said. She took my hand and led me closer to the house. When we came around the corner my blonde two-year-old sister with crystal blue eyes that look into your soul and understand things that they shouldn’t held my yellow broom and swept up glass. My Mother fell to her knees and cried. I watched her cry, not understanding, not knowing and took my sisters hand to lead her inside.