The First Cut

The first cut wasn’t with a blade. It wasn’t even visible.

It came one spring morning, in the back of a red pickup truck with rusted doors and a cracked windshield, the kind of vehicle that smelled like gasoline, coffee, and broken promises. I was sixteen. My father was silent.

We were driving up the mountain trail toward the forest line, just the two of us. That morning, he handed me a shovel and a bag of saplings. He didn’t say where we were going until we got there. Even then, he only pointed.

“Dig,” he said. “That’s your spot.”

I didn’t ask why.

The shovel was heavier than it looked. The dirt was stubborn, clinging like it knew what lay ahead. I pressed my foot to the blade and pushed. The metal slid into the earth with a sick crunch, like snapping bone beneath skin.

I remember the smell of wet soil. The buzz of distant bees. The sky, wide and bruised with clouds.

That was the first cut.

The first hole I ever dug.

He told me we were planting trees. A family tradition.

But it wasn’t about trees.

Each year, my father returned to this mountain. Each year, he planted one.

One tree. One memory. One scar.

“I plant them for those I’ve lost,” he said once, his voice thinner than the wind.

He never said their names.

But I remember the way his fingers trembled when he pressed the roots into the ground. Like they were bones. Like he was burying pieces of himself.

I kept planting every spring.

Some years I came alone. Others, I brought someone with me—a friend, a lover, once even a stranger I met in a grief group who said she needed “closure and quiet.” She never spoke a word on the drive back. Just wept silently into the collar of her coat.

I was twenty-three when I planted one for him.

The tree was a sapling pine, thin and spindly like the way his shoulders had become in the hospital bed. I dug for hours, sweating through my clothes, teeth clenched against the memories.

That cut hurt more than the first.

Years passed. I stopped counting.

The forest behind me grew thick with our ghosts. Oaks, pines, birch, ash—each one rooted in silence and soil. Each one a monument no one else would ever read.

But I could feel them.

In the springtime, when the thaw came, and the trees drank deeply of the mountain melt, I could almost hear them whisper.

One day, long after the cuts had become familiar, I brought my daughter.

She was seven. Her boots were too big. She wore a sunhat that flopped over one eye and carried a toy spade in her backpack.

I didn’t plan to bring her.

But grief had come for someone she’d barely known—her grandmother, my mother—and I couldn’t find the words to make it make sense.

So I took her to the mountain.

She didn’t ask questions.

Just followed me quietly as we trudged through bramble and leaf-fall. When we found a soft patch of earth beneath a grove of cedar, I handed her a small tree in a burlap wrap.

“Want to try?” I asked.

She nodded solemnly and dug.

Her first cut.

I stood back and watched.

Her hands were too small for the shovel, but she was determined. Every inch of progress felt like an echo of my own past, rippling through time, through dirt, through bloodlines.

When she finished, she looked up at me and whispered, “Will it miss her less if it grows tall?”

I couldn’t answer.

So I knelt beside her and pressed her hand to the soil.

“Just love it,” I said. “The rest will come.”

The forest is dense now.

I go less often, but when I do, I walk in silence, tracing old memories in the curve of trunks and the bend of branches.

Each tree still speaks.

Of first losses.

Of final goodbyes.

Of love so sharp it cuts without a blade.

The first cut is the deepest, they say.

Maybe because it’s the first time you learn that pain and growth are the same root.

That to love is to lose.

And to lose is to remember.

And to remember… is to plant something that remains.