Wheeler Avenue,
the Ides of March, 
Caesar is dead, you know that.
You don’t know Johnson’s Farm is closed,
that I spent high school Summer’s 
spraying dirty monkey dishes
and ketchup-stained ramekins in their kitchen. 
You don’t know their sugar house 
made maple syrup, with sap they 
got from the Sugar Maple in my front yard.
How once, I got our red rubber ball
wedged between its branches 
during a heated game of four-square. 
You never saw 
that Massachusetts, nowhere town,
nowhere road, lined in tin buckets—
the smell of maple smoke drifting,
a sweet mile away. 
Soon, the crocuses will bloom 
around the trunk of another tree, 
we had to cut down. 
I will sit and wonder if you also
picked the small purple blossoms 
on the side of Ballyum Road.
If your mother put them in a vase, like mine did.
Knowing they were too fragile
to last more than a few days. 

 
--Abby Truesdell