The way plants come out the rocks that sit in pools at their feet.

The way the wind speaks when it comes through our garden before a rain.

The way you run into the house when it does, sand still in your toes shoes in your hand.

Once, there was a plum tree. It hovered like a cloud in an old lady’s black-fenced terrace.

The lady took one photograph of the tree each year for its birthday to remember the day she’d planted its seed and posted these photos like magnets onto her fridge door.

 Each winter, the tree shivered in the wind, restless and alone.

It feared it always would be.

Stems hold perfect petals that droop. Crimson dust is sprinkled on insides and buds stick out like tongues. Drops of rain sit quietly on their edges.

The way it twists on itself, curls up, then reaches out.

The way it cushions itself from all sides.

Come closer: the trees’ branches hold others, hold even groups of leaves that each branch out. In the after-rain wind, the tree’s leaves move in clusters like hands in a wave.

You ate mountains of ice cream and loose corn chips lay singled out on your big silky bed. Don’t tell Dad, you said while we slept.

It all happened in passing. We almost forgot the whole thing.

Sunday evening and the cars still speed past our yard. Through the neighbour’s barred-up window, I imagine her sit as she listens to this, our fights, the cold fall wind as it sweeps through.

The solitude of her one piece of toast on her one kitchen plate is almost enough to swallow her whole.

Sunny Saturdays in June and the screen door never gets shut. The boys are out back building their own little world out of rocks, branches with leaves still attached. They give themselves names for just this place and fill it with kings and dragons.

No one sees you here as you watch from your kitchen window.