They watch their mother, trying to figure out what it means that she’s suddenly become obsessed with their yard, and is madly tearing plants out. Instead of someone spreading his life out on the lawn for strangers to puzzle over later, the children are caught in the thick of things. Instead of an abandoned middle-aged drunk, the children’s mother and the children themselves have been abandoned: the story’s first line informs us the father has stopped coming home. “Lumberjack Mom” has a boy and a girl in it too, but they’re actual children that live in the house, a Latinx brother and sister. Like Carver’s story, “Lumberjack Mom” is about the yard as a liminal space that the struggles inside the house can spill into, but Fragoza’s story flips the script. In a short coda to the story, the girl finds herself talking about what happened, “trying to get it talked out.” After a while, failing at this, she stops trying. Soon a young couple comes along, “the boy” and “the girl”, and drink and dance with him in this strange outdoor indoor space. When I think about Carribean Fragoza’s “Lumberjack Mom,” I find myself thinking about Raymond Carver’s “Why Don’t You Dance?” In the Carver story, a man who has just been through a breakup sets up his furniture on the lawn and sits down to pour himself “another” drink. The Post-Divorce Catharsis of Chopping Wood
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