The Myth of Wile E

Diabolical Attachments

The envelope sat on That Shelf in My Kitchen for days, with all my hopes sitting inside it, either dead, or not dead.

In case you were wondering, the mail carrier did in fact come up with a way to get my mail past enemy lines. Every day, a little after noon, I'd hear her voice shout, "Incoming!" As loud as her voice was, I could barely hear it over all the machinery churning away in the valley. Next there would be a thump as something hit my roof and bounced off, and that something would turn out to be a large Tupperware container holding my mail. After I got the mail out, I'd either throw it back empty or throw it back with outgoing mail inside. Each time, there'd be a long pause before she hollered, "Got it!" And then, "My four-year-old cousin can throw better than that!"

Meanwhile, the chainsaws had been exchanged for even more terrible machines, some with huge wheels and others with tank treads, and all of them wielding diabolical attachments. The deafening buzz of the chainsaws was replaced by the deafening sound of grinding and crunching, as loose branches were turned into mulch, and one by one the tree stumps were turned into piles of sawdust.

But I wasn't about to let this chaos stand in the way of feeding my white elephant. I decided what I should write next was a tribute to the apple tree.

See, I'd noticed that the apple tree had kept a diary, as all trees did, so I tried to copy it down for the apple tree the way I had once typed Mama's memoir for her. Each ring of the tree stump was a chapter telling a year of the tree's life. I had to copy down its story as fast as I could, because the stump grinders—which resembled giant pizza cutters and made a terrifying sound like a dentist's drill times a million—were closing in fast. They'd already cleared half the valley of stumps, and soon they would erase the apple tree's story forever.

I couldn't get very close to the stump because the fence was in the way, so I probably made a lot of transcription mistakes, but the memoir went something like this:

The Year in Which I Sprouted: I was born in this valley over a hundred years ago from a little pip. So, I called myself Pip, and came to be called Pip. Though I never knew my mother or father, I believe that one was some sort of tart green variety, and the other was some sort of sweet red variety, but there's no saying which was which. The year I became a sapling was a very good year with just the right amount of rain, and I grew fat very fast. There were a lot of trees all around me so I also grew as tall as I could, seeking out my own share of the sunshine.

And so on. The memoir included such chapters as "The Year of My First Forest Fire," "The Year it Basically Never Rained At All," "The Year of the Beetle that Almost Killed Me," "The Year of the Terrible Flood," "The Year a Snowstorm Almost Bent Me in Half," and so forth until the end. The apple tree had left off in the middle of its final chapter, "The Year of the Hailstorm," aka "The Year Someone Hung a Squirrel Box on Me," aka "The Year Someone Hung a Hammock on Me." It was a good life the apple tree had lived; still, I had a feeling the tree had gone to the lumberyard with a lot of its dreams undone.

I finished up the memoir and titled it My Life as an Apple Tree. I decided to take an "as told to" credit, which seemed fair enough.

Later I flipped through several issues of The Writing Bug, searching for a market that specialized in as-told-to memoirs from nonhumans. My best bet seemed to be this one publisher who'd recently bought a tell-all by a famous canine movie star. Of course, unlike Lucky the Labradoodle, the apple tree was neither famous for being an action star, nor infamous for hard partying and making a big comeback after rehab.

I looked out the window at the ruined swath of my valley, and the hundreds of tree trunks that still remained (though not for much longer), each and every one of them with a story that had been cut short. I wished I could tell them all. I could have been the Kitty Kelley of the trees.