My feet were in fungi with my face to the spring sun as I wondered how I managed to place myself here. I stood over decaying trees as the daughter of a dead lumberjack, struggling to clear a path with a hatchet. A younger me may have called it irony, but I knew this was simply how life continued on, despite loss.

Had I needed this trail ten years ago while he was still breathing, my father would have been here with a chainsaw. His steel toe boots would have marked their way through the spring mud and I would have watched him at the top of the hill, smelling the sawdust that marked my childhood. He worked through so many pairs of steel toes, but each set would do their time on the porch. After a day of cutting and hauling, he dumped the fallen sawdust out onto the steps before leaving them unlaced inside. They were always the best shoes to slip on my child-sized feet for a trip to the garage.

My father’s absence was one of contradictions. My days didn’t look different without him—my phone rarely rang on my birthday anyway. The heavy darkness felt a little lighter, now that I didn’t have to carry his, too. I didn’t worry about his broken heart alone in bed. There were no drunken teary calls; there was more space for hope.

I stood without him in the woods, itching with dirt. The entrance into acres of trees behind my sister's house was no more of a trail than when I started. Every time I thought I had finally found the forest floor, I only found another layer of brown pine needles settling in with the fungi. I stood in the decaying needles, missing my father and his chainsaw.

***

As a kid I begged him not to cut so much, to flatten a beautiful forest. I missed his talk of how powerful trees are—how their bark told you stories, how to know if they were a threat. His intuitive tree wisdom and respect for the earth still ran deep within me. I knew not to stand under ice-heavy branches after a storm. Walking through a trail, I watched for anything tall, thin, and dead. I knew a knotted carbuncle made a great coffee table, like the one that sat in our garage, or a precarious lamp, like the one that sat in my sister's basement, drilled into a hunk of pine and ready to topple. I read the gaps between rings in a trunk and knew larger openings represented a year of great growth.

Each tree had its own unique pattern of rings, tightly wound through the tough years and left with room to grow in the good years. I knew my father grew in his life. I watched him. He tried so hard, but it always felt like there just wasn’t enough room. My child self would lay in bed praying he would stop throwing coffee mugs in the kitchen, but I could feel his heart breaking through it. His rage made us both grieve. I hated that leaving a dish in the wrong place made this much hurt for us all. In the worst of times, I held onto the love in his eyes as it would switch to rage. He’d throw the computer through the window and I would wait for him to come back to me.

My father felt everything, and the hard feelings had to go somewhere. Anywhere. They wound him tight in ways I wanted to understand. I wanted to crack him open with an axe and give him more light, more oxygen. I wish he could have told me where to cut, which ring needed the space.

***

I imagined the rope that tied me to his pain decaying bellowing me as I chopped. My heart was so tethered—now what was I tied to? The rot below me was trying to become fertilizer for new life. After so many years of tight and narrow growth, my rings had begun to open up. If he had been here, would I still be wound tight? Would I have even been able to breathe enough to expand?

I sat on the muddy pine and told dad about how much I love trees, like I love him. I watched a beetle crawl as I told him about the trees in Oregon and Vancouver. I asked him if he knew that I always felt his heart when I hugged a tree. The decaying tree below me had been gone as long as him, and yet it still lay there. I knew this cycle of rot because of him. I thanked him for showing me his instincts, so I could use mine.

The trail I fought with is used every day now. My sisters and I take it to walk the dogs. We let them run ahead and through the fallen dead trees alongside the path. Parts of my father’s memory will always sting. I will always hurt through them. When a tree falls across the trail, I relish the inconvenience. I drag the log or grab the hatchet and remember the smell of sawdust.