Witnesses

Grace's house overlooks the cemetery, and the vacant lot next door is full of waiting plots.  This morbid view is obscured, though, by seven sugar maples, all planted by her father before either of us was born.

She doesn't remember this, though.  She can't remember much these days, to be honest.  But on Sundays, swinging on her front porch, she squints at the seed-laden branches, thinking back to last summer, when we watched through the leaves as the power company tore out the poplar down the road.

"It'd be a crime to cut them down," she says. "It'd be murder.  Just plain murder."