There’s trees on the old property that look funny, almost embarrassed, kinda stilted, kinda farting the vestiges of old piñata strings off behind them, shedding bits to the breeze like an ornery scent. Every string we couldn’t reach is still knotted up there. There’s a lot of strings too, a lot, those memories attached and bobbing as the wind lilts. Memories are a vague thing, if that says enough. It’s that the chronology gets muddled due to an over-extension of experience, but the memory is still there, the past itself inaccurately certain of an origin form. The mind is pure, unrefined frogshit. I forget things, maybe. Life’s a chance medley and we all forget things. But properly or mistakenly, things from your own porch, you don’t get to forget those. Lord don’t let you shed there.

There’s the trees on the old property, have fine smatterings of green and this thick bark that gets a rich black color in the rain. The rain is like tinder to all the colors, you remember that. We used to attach a rock to the end of the piñata string, a pebble more precise, and swing it up in an arc to catch the branch. Then you thread the piñata up there. That’s how we hung the thing—things really. We were one of those piñata families, the kind that went to the Mercado, bought the piñata from behind the booths out front, the donkey or elephant or whatever, full of cheap candy that you had to hold in your mouth for awhile before it gooed up. Dense tootsie rolls. You remember that. The animals hung from the ceilings of the Mercado booths behind the glass counters where the vendors sold used-up laptops and electronics and vivid phone cards geared towards Mexico. Greens and whites and reds on the calling cards, mostly.

At first it would take a good hour to get the piñata hung, our two children taking tries and screaming like snow angels when their thin arms didn’t have the proper muscle masses. You know, they couldn’t get up a good momentum to launch the rock up high enough. For years it was me who finally had to get the piñata up. Then the girls got slowly better at it.

It was always Joy who managed it first. I remember that. Joy being our younger child it was an unexpected achievement. And since I never did get my boys, I took special pride in how my Joy turned out. I thought she had the pragmatism of a man; my own contribution. A quick man too, not a sloucher or a daydreamer or nothing. My Joy wasn’t fat. You remember that. She was thick, but it was more muscle than anything. She was good for volleyball. Rippling legs. I started teaching Joy to shoot when she was young too. .38s to start. When Joy first hooked that rock around the branch I took her out and we got Blue Bell at the grocery with chocolate sauce.

Our children’s names were Joy and Dawn. The names sounded great when you doled them out; later, that’s how it goes, your kids ask you why you named them after dish detergents. I tried to explain to them that it’s the woman who really gets the names of the kids. Being women, my daughters don’t listen to me whatsoever.

Dawn, my oldest, started refusing to attend the piñata portion of the birthday revelries when she was about ten. Dawn said, “Y’all can stone the piñata just fine without me.” Dawn was always the strange one. Didn’t stop the rest of us though.

Joy still did a candy beating thing until she turned 18 and went up to Trinity for college. Joy studied business at college, got her an M.B.A.. It’s the precocious Trinity on the east coast of America, not that dynasty one in Dublin. Joy noted that difference to me many times, like she was proud. She was a patriot. I myself went State. Did real well too.

You remember that one of Joy’s birthdays. They, the kids, they were building what they called the ‘organic graffiti robots.’ That basically meant that they scoured the perimeter of my tool shed for junk and detritus, rusty nails, old boards. Then they would assemble the pieces on the table to make what they called robots. I think Joy and her friend, Amanda if I remember precise, were looking for tape or glue or something anyway.

Joy said, “I think we should ask my dad. He’s the best dad in the world. He usually has everything.”

It was in a very offhand way that Joy made this declaration. Her friend Amanda just shrugged and said, “Well, then ask him.”

It wasn’t that Dawn wasn’t kind about things. Dawn just didn’t think like that. She really couldn’t connect to cats, for instance. Dawn always recognized beauty in the world, I think, only she didn’t feel highlighting was an actual homage to any sort of winsome. She’d of liked the way I put that, my Dawn. I think Dawn thought that things like compliments and other social graces were an attempt to siphon in on a poise that wasn’t yours, as if drawing attention to something was a rude mastication process.

You can remember my Dawn asked me once, we were on a train ride out to see my nephews in Vermont, the lushness of the east a pleasant distraction out the window, the crappy sweat-dew on your temples, the old tobacco barns sagging, “Why do people ask where you’re from? All these people on the train ask, ‘Where are you from?’ but they don’t really want to know. Asking someone where they’re from is just asking that person to ask you where you are from. Does that make sense, Michael? They ask where you’re from so that afterwards you have to ask where they’re from. It’s the last part they’re waiting for. Like Christmas.” Maybe she found it all, all the polite transactional conventions, a posture of worth, found it like fashion. There were places I hated to take Dawn. I didn’t like to take long trips with her; an hour about did it. Not to the V.A. functions. She said some outlandish things. There were places Dawn refused to go with me too. She didn’t like any of my friends or any of their children. John’s kid bit a chunk out of Dawn during bible study over some reason that I don’t recall. You remember there’s a crescent scar on Dawn’s calf from where John Jr.’s bottom teeth won the better part of the digging war. She didn’t do well at the rotary meetings even when I let her bring books to read. Dawn hated the Girl Scouts.

The piñata strings are old and grey and brown. Sometimes, in the wet spring mists, the old strings will look like the cords of a tree phantom. Like slow-moving giants on the country earth. And sometimes if you’re around to watch the dusk, the strings turn into a nice gossamer and catch up the orange sundown light.

Up in the tree, closest to the corner of the house, there’s a few decrepit boards of the scaffolding there. You remember that thing. The old treehouse.

The girls wouldn’t leave me alone. This was well before my wife left. Susan. Susan was wonderful. I don’t think she cared particular about how I felt or what my thoughts and dreams were, she just enjoyed being with someone who was dependably nice. We didn’t really connect about things that happened in the day hours, but we were a company at night. We could really feel together, but without the weight of obligation. We liked to hum. Soothing noises.

Susan taught me about Dan Reeder. Maybe Dawn brought him to my attention, actually. I got the album. My days go places, you remember that. There’s that song “Work.” I like that one, it’s easy to hum. That Dan guy really had something. And there were others I liked too. Then, direct after Joy went to Trinity, Susan left. I don’t think that dependably nice worked for her anymore. Susan left me the habit, though; I still hum to myself sometimes. Can’t remember the lyrics of what we hummed. You know Susan never really forgave me for Dawn.

About that: the women wouldn’t leave me alone about it, so I started constructing a treehouse. It was supposed to be some family milestoney thing. I think it was a chestnut tree and it had a wide spread of branches. Might not have been a chestnut, and it turns out that the treehouse wasn’t completely sound. I should have used screws instead of nails, maybe. I should have thought the thing out. I got pressure-treated lumber though; still should have used some screws.

Dawn was up there afterward. Joy came screaming into the house. The whole thing leaned and our oldest daughter went down with all the boards. The tree wasn’t a high one. Dawn was maybe ten feet in the air. She toppled out of the treehouse and it kinda simultaneously collapsed with her, is what Joy refigured. When I pulled the boards off of her, Dawn’s whole face was bloody and mashed. It scared me in a great way that Dawn wasn’t screeching; because, y’think about the pain. She was just blubbering, strings of this dischargey blood swinging off her face. It sounded, the noises that were coming out of Dawn’s face, like the coo of a dove or a barn fowl. I wrapped her in my arms. I pressed her face hard against my chest. I held her swaddled like that all the way to the hospital and my limbs never did seem smaller. I remember thinking that I was supposed to apply pressure to a wound. It was a vast wound and a strangely silent ride to the hospital, Dawn making theses noises that sounded like contented slumber, the rest of us with wide eyes and souls, the windows down and the air moving through them. We were moving fast; my Susan was a good driver. Susan was wearing this yellow blouse, her jaw a bit unhinged. You remember the sensation of blood seeping thickly into my shirt and starting to drip.

And there were many surgeries, but the two sides of her face, we were told, would never move in tandem again. The left side was a little slow, like it was numb, like wax in the sun, but just the one side. I built that tree house with my hands. It didn’t collapse when I was up on it, full weight and all. I built that treehouse and put the illusion of an early stroke all across my Dawn’s face. I did it. My oldest, Dawn. I didn’t mind the way she looked, but as she got older I really did mind the thoughts she let out of her mouth. The half that worked right, that is.

You see, I went about it when Dawn turns, oh, about twenty anyway. No good though. I had found on the internet—I spent a lot of time at the Carnagie's library then—there was a cure, an experimental science moving out of the empirical envelope. The doctors I called assured me that afterwards, with the new things they were doing, Dawn could move fluidly. Dawn could move right again, s’what I told her when I went to my daughter with pamphlets and research and facts, my apology. She listened and a tear pinched reluctantly from her good eye. She adamantly refused the surgery cure. She felt that she was fine, that cosmetics weren’t what made a person. “A person makes a person,” Dawn told me. She was right, in more ways than anything, but I never forgave her for leaving me my guilt.

I think if Dawn had agreed to the experimental surgery, my Susan would still be here.

Susan remarried. That’s the way she ended up coping for the long term. Found her someone without history. The girls call him Mac. Susan’s the reason the kids have such an appreciation for animals, Susan’s the one used to bury the pets on the back forty too. She had that kinda heart. It was Susan who dug the holes and made quick ceremonies. Ol’ Mangey’s back in there. They cried for a week on that one. Well, Joy and Susan did anyway. Ol’ Mangey had those almost opposable thumb-toes and what not. Susan, after she left me, got her education and went on to be a nurse at the Sally hospital. It’s one of those old hospitals with a sour reek and all the decorations and chairs, even the computers, are sallow from antiquation. I been in the Sally Hospital a few times over some things in the tavern. You remember that. I miss that woman. She used to make me up a hot toddy the first thing on Christmas morning even before she let Joy and Dawn harass me about the presents. Susan didn’t last too much as a nurse.

There’s still ladder steps on the old tree, awkward boards tacked up the trunk, bleeding around the nail heads, but the sod beneath is patchy. I’ve gotten old. It’s all a show I’d given into once and now I artlessly and pleasantly don’t give a shit. I don’t have time for guilt no more. There’s trees. They look nice and give you shade, imperceptibly growing towards the sky. I wonder how much longer I’ve got. I remember that I’m still here. My girls are good about coming around at least once a month. I love my girls, after all. I always thought Joy would visit more than Dawn, but they do come around about the same. I mention it to everyone, about my two treasures.

There’s tire swings on the trees too. The remnants of tire swings, the ropes indenting these shiny rings on the tree branches, mythology scars. Tire swings need dense rope. The kind of rope that was in the lives of longshoremen and stevedores. The rope is all tight and twisted, not a bit of give. I got a friend out of Boston to finally ship it to me. Over the winters and summer sunshines, the top of the tire gets brittle and eventually the upper ridge crumbles and we’d take the half-life rubber out to the transfer station off I-40; but we always could reuse the rope for the next tire. I remember the girls in the progress of mid-swinging, raw-red knees and shins ragged and tan. That’s really the only way to remember the whole thing. That’s how you remember them.

Dawn’s a photographer now days. Mostly weddings, but she does her own hobbying too. There’s a real attention to composition: background, midground, foreground. She’s more quiet nowadays. Or she might just be being more reticent just around me. I don’t mind that. I don’t ask her about men. I don’t ask her about women. I’ve learned. How can I know any of it?

Dawn likes to talk about her art, so I ask her about it and listen. Occasionally there’s just no catching me up no matter how much explanation she is willing to tender. She doesn’t take pictures of trees much but recently she’s really playing well with the negative space in her compositions. I ask her to take pictures of the house and yard, but she doesn’t like it. Dawn likes big things moving off into the gutter of the photo. She got a big train you can barely see, all in grey scale, moving out of the picture edge. You just see the caboose and really only the tail of that. “Where’s the rest of the train, Michael?” she asked me, as if that question explained something fundamental.

In the rest of the picture there’s all these tracks running around the rail yard in convergence zones and then splitting gracefully into divergencies, sort of, and with railroad ties perpendicularly spanning underneath the steel bars. The ground is all ballast gravel and wilted and dry weeds and graffiti on the depot walls and all these crisscrossing telephone wires overhead. There’s some faded clouds in the sliced sky of the hub and the picture feels like an early cold morning. Dawn explained to me that the lines are important, how the lines interrelate is important, and so is negative space and the illusion of depth.

I really try to look into the picture and furrow my brow. I tell my Dawn it’s a beautiful picture and I try to look moved after the statement. I look away from her and cock my head like I’m listening to the image. Then I relax my face suddenly after, like I heard the picture say something and I want to catch at it well, like I’m taking in something simple just for itself. And I wonder if my Dawn can see me, see me trying, y’know, trying to tear my own face off and string it up in the trees for her.