"This one?" She stops at a lodgepole pine, thick and healthy, blocking light from two younger trees growing in its shadow.
"How'd you know?"
"The two behind it are struggling. Not enough sun. If you take this one, they'll have room to grow." She traces a fingeralong the bark. "My dad was a forest ranger before he went into the lumber mill. He used to take me out on weekends and show me how to read a stand."
The paint can is in my hand. The tree is exactly right. She read the forest the way I do. The way my grandfather taught me. Not as inventory to be harvested, but as a living system that needs balance.
The mark goes on the trunk. Yellow paint. Clean stripe at chest height.
"Where?" The word comes out rougher than intended.
"Where what?"
"Where was your dad a ranger?"
"Pacific Northwest. Olympic National Forest. He transferred to a mill in Ohio when I was twelve, after my mom passed." Just fact delivered plainly, the way a person does when they've long since finished grieving and the loss has become part of the landscape of their life. "Heart attack on the floor of the mill when I was sixteen. Quick. They said he didn't feel anything."
My hand goes still on the tree. Paint dripping down the bark in a slow yellow line.
"Nora."
"It was a long time ago." She looks at me directly. Not performing strength. Just being it. "He would have loved this place. The way you manage the cuts, leaving corridors for wildlife, letting the canopy recover before you go back in. He talked about that all the time. Sustainable yield. Most people in the industry didn't want to hear it."
The paint can goes back in the pack. My voice takes a second to arrive. "Most still don't."
"But you do."
"Third generation. If I cut everything now, there's nothing for the next sixty years. My grandfather understood that. Passed it down."
She nods. Then her gaze lifts past me, up toward the ridge line where the Douglas fir gives way to alpine meadow and the sky opens wide and blue and infinite.
"There," she says. "That's where the garden would go."
"What?"
"If someone were going to plant a garden. High enough for sun exposure, low enough for wind protection. That bench of level ground between the two granite outcrops." She points. "Morning sun from the east, natural windbreak on the north and west. You'd need to clear the scrub and bring in soil, but the drainage would be good because of the slope below."
She's looking at my land. At a piece of my mountain that I have walked past a thousand times without seeing what she just saw in thirty seconds. A garden. Roots in the ground. Something growing.
My chest does something I don't authorize. A pull. Deep and low, somewhere behind my ribs, in the same place where I felt her absence the one morning she slept past six and wasn't in the kitchen when I came in from the porch.
"My ex-wife thought gardens were impractical," I hear myself say. "Said there was no point growing food when the grocery store was forty-five minutes away."
The words land in the open air between the pines. I haven't mentioned Beth in years. Haven't said the phrase "ex-wife" out loud since the divorce papers came through, seven years ago, signed at a kitchen table in a house I sold the following month.
Nora doesn't react the way I expect. No pity. No probing follow-up. She just turns those brown eyes on me with the same patient warmth she gives everything and says, "How long were you married?"
"Three years. Together five."
"What happened?"
The honest answer is complicated. The simple one isn't. "She wanted a different life than the one I could give her. Decided the mountain wasn't worth the trade-off."
"The trade-off being you."
Something about the way she says it. Not a question. An observation. Delivered without judgment but carrying an edge of quiet anger on my behalf that I did not see coming and do not know what to do with.
"It was seven years ago."
