Pine Tree

The house smelled the way it did when the Christmas tree was in the living room. When it was in the corner and still. Frozen with no decorations or lights. It was as if Christmastime had made a mistake and come to the house in the afternoon, in summer when it was hotter inside the house than it was outside. That summer morning, when the house was still cool, Christine’s mother had poured the pine-tree-smelling liquid into a silver bucket half-full of hot water. Christine had seen the bottle under the sink and now she could read the label: Pine-Sol.

Pine-Sol was gold and beautiful and when her mother had raised the bottle to screw the cap back on the sun shone through the glass and cast a golden beam of light from the window to the kitchen floor she was about to wash. This must be what heaven looks like, Christine thought. The smell of pine trees, gold shining on the green and grey tiles in the kitchen and the music playing. That song about golden silence was playing on the radio and Christine thought she might already be in heaven, but maybe no one had told her yet. It was as if pine trees were all around her: the smell of the trees at Elk Island Park on that day she had learned to swim and even her father had come along, and the pine tree in the backyard where she ran to bury the putty discs she had made. She had knelt under its branches then, and the ground was so cool. Christine remembered how it felt, how the needles poked through the thin cotton of her nightdress and stuck to the smooth skin on the tops of her feet and pricked her fingers as she dug in the earth. There was a pine tree in the neighbour’s yard too, only the fence separated the two trees. Remembering that moment, it was as if her whole life of seven years had become a life of a hundred years and she felt old and young, and alone and part of her family, as if she were looking at her mother washing the floors through a window. Of course, she thought, this must be what heaven is like. She saw that between the two big yellow words Pine-Sol was a tiny pine tree. Pine-Sol. Pine trees were all around her it seemed, but she wasn’t afraid and didn’t want to get away. The bottle of Pine-Sol. Heaven could be this simple thing, Christine thought, the scent of the water her mother used to wash floors.

Then the news came on the radio.

The small community of Shell Lake, Saskatchewan is in shock this morning …

Christine’s mother rushed to the radio and turned up the volume.