No sense telling my wife Devonne that it took three guys and a fork lift to get this tree onto the pickup truck. What good would it do anyway? None, because the tree I picked out at the tree store is the biggest damn tree I could find — nearly a quarter of a ton, and nearly 20 feet high.

It’s the kind of tree whose new home really ought to be dug with a backhoe not by two puny people with a shovel and a pick bought at a K-Mart special sale.

No good whatsoever.

So I just pull this pickup into our driveway and act like this is no big deal to keep Devonne from noticing how big a deal this actually is.”Hi, honey,” I say. “I got the tree!”

“Oh my Lord in heaven,” she says. (She apparently noticed.)

“Yeah, it’s pretty,” I say. (Pretending not to notice.) “A blue pine. Just like we said we wanted.”

“I didn’t know they sold trees that big,” she says. “At least not to private citizens. Isn’t that more of, like, a corporate office complex tree?”

“A tree is a tree,” I say, pointing out that I really had no choice but to buy a tree this big. Because, tree-wise, I am running out of time. This is what I discovered at the tree store. I discovered my mortality. Who knew buying a tree could be so depressing? You go up and down the aisles and look at these scrawny little saplings and you say to yourself, “Wow, in 50 years this sure will be a mighty tree.” And then you think: “Wait a second, by the time this tree becomes a real tree, I will very likely be dead.”

So this is what led me to the blue pine towering over all the other trees. It was a tree that could do more than just stand in my yard and remind me of life’s impermanence. I’m trying to explain this to Devonne, but she seems pretty caught up in the permanence. “We better start digging,” she says. “This could take days.”

She works the shovel, I work the pick, then we trade. An hour goes by. We have made, well, a dent in the so-called soil. This is clay. This is rock. This is horrible. We measure the root ball. Three feet wide, three feet deep. And the hole is supposed to be twice the size? I work the shovel, she works the pick, then we trade. Another hour goes by. Our dent is two inches deeper. This could take months.

I think of the long, straight row of towering white birch trees near the railroad tracks not far from our house. They must be 100 years old. Who planted them? Do those people mind that they’re not here to appreciate them?

Maybe they knew, deep down, what I know: Trees hold stories. Trees stand around and absorb the plot of, well, your plot. The land changes hands, but the trees stay. You tilt your head back and marvel at the size of that tree and wonder what it’s heard, what it knows, and if you listen hard enough you hear whispers. Of course you do. This is what trees are for.

And our tree? Our tree has no stories. I mean, our tree might as well be plastic. An instant tree belies the very purpose of trees.

By now, Devonne has quit. And I’m here breaking my back with this horrible pick for what? For McTree.

Just then, our neighbor, Riva, appears. “You should use the other side of the pick,” she says.

Riva, 79, came to America from Israel 30 years ago. Her daughter and son-in-law live down the street, and Riva moved in with them five years ago.

I love Riva, but she shouldn’t tell me how to dig.

I’m cold. My back aches. My arms are falling off. I don’t even like my tree anymore.

“The pointy end works better,” Riva insists while I suppress the urge to snarl at her. “This is what I did, you know,” she says. “Fourteen hours a day. I was only 17. But I didn’t mind digging.” I’m surprised she’s bringing this up. Riva doesn’t often talk about the war. I never actually knew what labor she had to do in that camp in Lithuania. I didn’t know about the digging.

“Roads,” she says. “We dug roads.” She says she got good at digging, so good that she was appointed head of the crew.

“A 17-year-old girl in charge of men,” she says, sitting down, settling into the story. “They resented me. They thought maybe I was a collaborator with the Germans. I wasn’t. I was just good at digging.” Her own people turned against her.

That’s when she decided to escape. I never knew that’s why she escaped. She made it to the forest. She joined the partisans, for four years worked as a soldier in a ragtag army of patriots working to defeat the Nazis. She wouldn’t learn until much later that her mother was killed in reprisal for her escape from the camp. “If only I hadn’t been so good at digging,” she says with a sigh. “But you can’t think like that.”

I’m now using the pointy end of the pick, out of an eerie respect for Riva. The point goes “plink plink” against the rock. We’re only about a foot down now, and the sun is threatening to set.

I look at my tree, a tree that needs a story. And here’s a story that needs a witness strong enough to hold it and carry it for 100 years and beyond.

What a perfect tree. I bet I can keep digging if I turn on the porch light.

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