For 14 Years, the Same Woman Bought a Christmas Tree From My Farm. This Year She Didn’t Come, So I Went Looking for Her

My name is Henry Ashford. I’m 67, and I grow Fraser fir Christmas trees on a mountain farm in Ashe County, North Carolina.

My wife, Joyce, and I planted our first seedlings in 1983. It takes about ten years to grow a good Christmas tree, so you learn patience in this business, whether you want to or not.

Joyce died eight years ago. Now it’s just me, a couple of seasonal workers, and thirty thousand trees.

Christmas tree farming is strange. You work eleven months in the cold and the mud and the heat, shearing and spraying and mowing, for four weeks of the year when everyone comes.

And when they come, it’s wonderful. Families with little kids running between the rows. Couples taking pictures. Hot cider and wreaths and somebody’s dog always getting loose.

Every year, among all those families, there was one woman who came alone.

She showed up for the first time fourteen years ago, on the first Saturday of December. Silver hair, blue wool coat, kind face. She walked the whole farm for an hour and came back to the barn with a ticket for the most crooked tree on the property.

I mean truly crooked. Bent at the top like it was trying to look over its own shoulder.

“Are you sure about this one?” I asked her. “I’ve got some real beauties up on the north slope.”

“I’m sure,” she said. “Nobody else will take it. Everybody deserves a Christmas.”

Her name was Evelyn Marsh. She lived down in Boone. A widow, like me.

The next year, on the first Saturday of December, she came back. Same blue coat. Same crooked tree. Different tree, of course, but somehow she always found the most crooked one.

It became a tradition. Joyce noticed it first. She started setting aside a crooked tree for Evelyn every year, with a little red ribbon on it.

After Joyce passed, I kept doing it.

Evelyn and I would talk for twenty minutes or so while my workers bagged the tree. About the weather. About grandchildren. About the year’s news. Once a year, every year.

I never asked for her phone number. It never seemed like the right thing to do.

This year, the first Saturday of December came.

I tied the red ribbon on a beautiful, terribly crooked tree on the east slope. I made sure the cider was hot.

She didn’t come.