Free My Life in Dioramas by Tara Altebrando Page A

watched the wind blow the weeping willow’s long soft branches. I loved that tree. Loved how when it was in full bloom some of its branches brushed the grass, how you could hide behind strands of leaves during a game of hide-and-seek. A tree expert who my parents had hired to take down some dead trees a few years back had studied this one, with a huge hollow dead branch broken off the main trunk, just hanging there. He told us that, sure, he could cut it off but it would just happen again. The tree was fine. That’s just what weeping willows did. They let part of themselves die so the rest could live.
    I thought about asking my dad if my mom was depressed. But he looked pretty down himself, and I wasn’t sure there was much point. So I got up and grabbed my scooter from the shed and started making lazy circles onthe tennis court. After a few jumps and tricks, I said, “Oh, Mom said to tell you to get dinner started.”
    He took a final drag of his cigarette and stubbed it out on the bottom of his shoe then got out his phone. Holding it to his ear as I balanced on one foot with a long leg out behind me like an ice skater, he asked, “Pepperoni or plain?”

    After pizza and homework, I went downstairs and started to play around with some green yarn and tiny bits of green paper. When I had the hang of making tree branches, I searched around but there were no more shoeboxes down there, so I went up to ask my mom if I could raid her closet. My parents were sitting in the living room, each of them reading in an armchair. When they were like this, so normal, so boring looking, it was hard to imagine when they met and were younger and, well, cooler.
    â€œMom, can I grab a shoebox from your closet?”
    â€œSure,” she said.
    So I did that, but on my way back downstairs, I said, “I’m going to have ice cream. Anybody want any?”
    â€œNo, thanks,” they both said. I went to the kitchen and got out a Tupperware and took two eggs and a piece of chicken out of the refrigerator. I cut open the plastic on the chicken and slid it into the Tupperware, then quietly cracked the eggs ontop of it and closed it up. I figured it wouldn’t stink for a while so I just stashed it way in the back of the pantry for safekeeping. I fixed a bowl of ice cream, grabbed the bag of Barbies I’d left by the front door, and went back downstairs.
    As soon as I started making the weeping willow for real, I got the idea to turn the box on its side so that it was more tall than wide. I lined the walls of the box with black construction paper, then cut a strip of a sort of gray/brown felt into the shape of a tree trunk and glued it to the back wall. Then, one by one, I took my strips of green yarn, each of which I’d tied still more yarn to, and so on and so on, to create the look of the weeping branches, gluing them to the top of the box so they draped down. It took a while, but it was shaping up to really look like a tree so I kept at it. When it was done, I took some of these little furry glitter balls I had hanging around in a jar and threaded string into them with a needle. I made five of them in different colors before I started hanging them from the tree.
    Party lights.
    From the bag of Barbies, I pulled out a dress made of red gingham fabric and cut out the largest square I could get out of it.
    A blanket for stargazing.
    When I decided to take a break for ice cream before putting myself and maybe some cousins in the scene, I saw that it had melted.
    I went ahead and finished the scene.

    In the living room my dad was asleep on the couch.
    Upstairs, my mother was reading in bed.
    When I poked my head in to say good night to her, Angus got up and followed me into my room.

14.
    I had zero opportunity to retrieve my Tupperware of Stink from the pantry Tuesday morning but it seemed unlikely anyone would find it before I got home. My mom had a day of networking for a bunch of Hudson Valley lawyers