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