growing up/growing old

05/04/2025

Lately, I’ve been looking at photographs of the Tillamook Burn.

Today I talked to my grandparents. Their voices made me cry.

My mom is helping them pack their memories away.

Beloved objects from the house that I spent so much time in, being groped at by strangers, people who see a chip in a plate instead of a mark from when my sister laughed so hard that her fork took a piece of the plate with it. 

Black and white photos of flames licking at trees that have stood for centuries.

A childhood friend told me the other day that the tree planted in the front yard of my childhood home was uprooted.

I sobbed at the picture she sent me of my memories laying mutilated on the front lawn of a stranger. An arm separated from a body.

Today my grandma told me that her flowers are dying as fall creeps in and that three of their trees came down in the storms. I thought of my own tree.

Three trees completely uprooted, removed like a bad tooth, leaving scars invisible to most, but grotesquely visible to me.

Did you know that after six years of ravenous fires spontaneously sparking, the community of Tillamook got together and eventually planted seventy-two million seedlings to replace the thousands of acres of old trees?

Things die before they are ready but other wait, eager to sew their own seeds, to build their own families in these haunted homes, and us ghosts drive past and point to the top floor and say “Look! That was my brother’s room! I wonder if they painted over the navy blue of his youth; if another young boy is in there now, growing too old for his teddy bear”.

The friend I used to play house with is pregnant with her second child now. She’s having a girl. When we were young we thought we would be like aunts to each other’s children, but now I’m rarely in the state, and her son keeps getting bigger and my face is the same as any stranger’s.

They call the series of fires catastrophic. The Tillamook Burn.