We were the people who moved. It was a time of movement, and we were people who moved. We moved from small apartment to small apartment to large apartment to small, from rental to house and to rental again. We moved from boxes in large, cool shadows of buildings over the smell of Italian bread baking to small white- paneled huddles on stretches of grass to homes that stood at polite distances from one another, the sound of lawnmowers and the sound of cicadas crossing our driveways. This was not some destiny manifesting itself; we moved back at least as often as we moved forward. Even when we weren’t moving at all we were in some sense moving back. The accents changed around us, the speed of the cars, the number of stoplights and demonstrative churches. The bumpers changed stickers. Our son walked on uneven sidewalks and between banks of exhaust-darkened snow and across lawns and down a street that rarely saw traffic. Were our neighbors moving? We were moving. Though there were times we paused, paused standing on our back decks or on our front stoops or on fire escapes that looked over so many rooftops. It was those moments when we felt it most keenly: the ground under us, already on its way, away.

They have built a tree outside my window. They have built another one behind that. They have filled both with white flowers, white like fresh paper, with a little yellow at the core, for dignity. The brown limbs underneath the white are like us. They hold everything up, up. I write to you about this not to complain— no-one seeing this could think to complain— but because someone must mention the trees, and because someone must need to be told.