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

Evelyn was sitting in a wheelchair by the window when I walked into her room with that tree.

She looked at me. She looked at the tree. Then she put both hands over her face and started to cry.

“You noticed,” she said.

“Fourteen years, Evelyn,” I said. “Of course I noticed.”

The nurses decided to bend the rules. One of them found a box of old lights in a storage closet. We set the tree up in the corner of her room, and by the time we got the lights on, half the residents on her hall had come by to see it.

I stayed until visiting hours were over.

I came back the next day. And the next.

Over those weeks, I learned more about Evelyn than I had in fourteen years of twenty-minute conversations. She’d been a librarian for thirty-five years. Her husband, Walter, had died of cancer the year before she first came to my farm.

That first Christmas after Walter died, she told me, she couldn’t stand the thought of a perfect tree in an empty house.

“So I picked the one that looked the way I felt,” she said. “Bent over. Still standing.”

I told her about Joyce. About the red ribbons. About how Joyce had always said there was something special about that woman in the blue coat.

“She saved them for me?” Evelyn asked.

“Every year.”

Evelyn was quiet for a long time.

“I wish I’d known her,” she said.

“She would have liked you,” I said. “She told me so.”