The Odyssey Tree

By Jeannette Angell

Amelia kept the tree in the center of her living room, in the place of honor, so that anybody who came into her apartment would be certain to see it right away.

Not, of course, that she had very many visitors. There had been Harriet, in the old days, back when Harriet's husband had first died (only they always said "passed on," as though the word "death" were somehow objectionable and even vaguely obscene), and Harriet had come frequently, looking for company. She visited and drank tea and gossiped gently in the late-afternoon shadows; but then Harriet had died, too, and so she didn't come any more.

Mr. Phillips, the landlord, stopped by promptly on the first day of the month to collect the rent check and to inquire after any problems that Amelia might be having with the premises; and sometimes she sat and thought about what she could say to him so that he would stay a few minutes longer. She invented noisy pipes, windows that didn't quite close properly, a bit of suspected moisture on the ceiling... But her imagination wasn't good, and anyway the apartment was in excellent repair. By the time that Mr. Phillips came around again on the first, she gave up and meekly handed him the rent check with only a brief exchange of pleasantries, and that was that.

No one else came. It was a pity, too, especially as she had something so marvelous to show off. Something that she had thought up, all by herself. An idea so fabulous that she had taken nearly a month to formulate it, turning it over and over again in her mind, polishing it like a small pebble that she might have happened upon at the beach. It was a perfect idea, and it was hers.

She had gone out to the second-hand shop down the street to find a trestle table that would be suitable; and there had been such a to-do with the young woman in the shop about having it delivered (for Amelia obviously couldn't attempt to install it on her own), that she had taken the rest of the day to recover from the girl's rudeness to her. But once the table arrived it was perfect. She put it in the living room, and put the tree on top of it.

It wasn't a real tree, of course, because that would have required too much effort to care for, and it would have made her too sad when it finally died. No: this tree was artificial, and not even exactly an artificial Christmas tree: those were usually plump and robust, even the ones that were made in such silly colors, like blue or white; they all at least looked like trees. This one was scraggly, almost limp, the sort of tree that one sees at the end of winter, when the spring thaw hasn't yet set in and the world seems entombed in snow and cold. It was marked down at the department store to almost nothing; and when Amelia went to pay for it, the cashier seemed embarrassed by the transaction, and anxious for her to take the tree and leave.

But the moment that Amelia saw the tree, she knew that it was what she was looking for, had always been looking for. For all its frailty, it seemed to her defiant, sitting on its little wooden base, as though daring the sales clerks to discard it on the rubbish heap. Amelia saw it, and she knew at once that she had found what she was looking for.

Her Odyssey Tree.

She took it home and sat with it for a long time in the shadows of her apartment (she distrusted light and liked to keep the thick lace curtains closed, most of the time); and then after a while she went and lifted the boxes out of the dresser in her bedroom and grouped them around the tree, removing all of her tiny treasured objects from them one at a time; and slowly the tree began to take shape.

First of all, of course, there was the scarab brooch. The one that she had kept clean and polished over the years, the one that her Aunt Martha had brought back from her long-ago honeymoon trip to Egypt in 1902. The brooch was real, one of the treasures that they put behind glass, these days, in museum cases but back then were still available to the average tourist, like Aunt Martha and Uncle Henry. Well, Henry and Martha were both in their graves these long years now, and the brooch belonged to Amelia. She fastened it, with some difficulty, to the top of the tree. The branch bent a little under the sudden weight, and some of the needles fell off at once; but it stayed on quite satisfactorily for all of that, and she turned back to her boxes.

And then out came all the other treasures from far-off places: the postcards from nephews and nieces in Paris and Rome and Singapore and San Francisco; the sprig of heather that Father Macmillan had brought back from Scotland in 1952; the tiny tinkling cow-bell from her old dormitory-mate, now a grandmother and living in Switzerland; all the memories of other people's travels that Amelia had hoarded, all through the years, and now finally had a place to display. Souvenirs of other people's travels. People who said that they cared for her, but never came to visit. People who saw all of the things that she had only seen in books.

Amelia had, of course, never left Massachusetts. Travel had always seemed too risky, somehow, too fraught with hazards and difficulties. One never knew what they ate in those wild foreign places; and she had never seemed to be able to find the suitable traveling companion she claimed that she sought.

Now it was far too late to think about traveling anywhere.

So she filled the tree with her treasures, and sat back and looked at it and smiled. Her Odyssey Tree. She was quite please with herself, actually, for thinking of such a clever name, a name filled with the echoes of heroic voyages and exotic landfalls and mysterious encounters. She fell asleep that night on her chintz-covered sofa, still nodding at the tree, still smiling.