You Could Make This Place Beautiful: A Memoir

When Maggie Smith’s husband returns from a business trip with a pinecone for their son, she thinks little of it. Her son collects treasures he finds in nature. Smith often finds rocks and acorns in her son’s pockets while doing laundry. When she sees the pinecone, she is struck with the thought that it resembles a grenade—another instance of the kind of foreshadowing that can only be recognized in hindsight.

After her husband moves away and she begins therapy, Smith wonders why she did not tell about the pinecone and the postcard right away when she and her husband were still in counseling. She realizes that she concealed what she knew out of fear: “I wanted to save the marriage, as if I held a grenade in my trembling hands, barely daring to breathe, and just prayed I wouldn’t jostle it and set it off. To tell the truth was to pull the pin” (206). Smith’s friend refers to The Addressee as “Pinecone,” but Smith recognizes that the woman her husband has an affair with is not the reason her marriage explodes. The pinecone is a collection of shared experiences culminating in their divorce.