APPLE TREE
When night comes, we sleep. When morning comes, we wake up. In the middle of the day we eat oatmeal cookies and bologna sandwiches. We leave our crumbs on the kitchen counter, wipe some to the floor with the palms of our hands. We dust the palms of our hands on the legs of our jeans. Outside there is a giant sky and a lawn of green grass and children skipping down a sidewalk. Yesterday there was a flash of lightening that struck the apple tree in the front yard. By the end of the month it will die but first it will slowly drip sap from the heart of its trunk. We will try to save it. We will wrap bandages around its middle, clean white strips ripped one by one from an old sheet. It will remind me of my childhood and I will smile. You will ask and I will talk about my grandfather's garden, how he and I used to stake up his tomato plants with strips just like these. You will smile, run your thumb down the side of my face, say how you wished you had known me. Then the children will run around us in slow circles, holding hands and singing a song we both know. Tomorrow we will get up and do it again, the memory of their song still on our lips.