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

I told myself she was just late. Maybe the roads were bad.

She didn’t come Sunday either. Or the next Saturday.

By the second week, I couldn’t sleep. Fourteen years. She had never missed a year.

So I did something I’d never done. I drove down to Boone and started asking around.

It’s a small town. It took me two days and four conversations to find out that Evelyn Marsh had fallen on the ice outside her house in late November and broken her hip. After surgery, she’d been moved to a rehabilitation center to recover.

I found out something else too. Medicare only covers so many days in a skilled nursing facility in full, and after that the co-pays add up fast. Her supplemental insurance plan wasn’t great. Her kids lived far away, in Charlotte and Richmond, and they were trying to figure out home health care so she could go home safely.

She was going to spend Christmas in a rehab center.

So I went back up the mountain, cut down that crooked tree with the red ribbon on it, tied it in the back of my truck and drove it right back down to Boone.

The nurse at the front desk looked at me like I’d lost my mind.

“Sir, you can’t bring a tree in here.”

“It’s a small one,” I said. “And it’s crooked. Nobody else wanted it.”