MaryAnn Bennett Rosberg Chicago, IL email Treed On My Birthday. A yellow parakeet with a green chest sits on the curb of the North Park Nature Center. I try to catch him or her (I can’t remember how you tell) as I did Sky or Keetie when I was a child. But he or she flies to the top of the fence, and then to the trees. I pray for a late winter. The spin of the spiders around my shirtsleeve distracts me from crossing the threshold and I am already on the tree tunneled brickedpath before I think about it. On the stone bench at the end are sacred offerings of an empty 12pack and cigarette cartons. Taking over as temple cleaner, I carry them down the dirtway, across the fallen trees with lightning worm signatures, to the meadow where the spring sticks downy with sun had stood before the park befired them. The survivors are sky pointing, striped with leaves at their bases. I thread through more spider strands, around a clutch of oak leaves, breast feathers, and a sliver of mirror reflecting sky to where the human high mound loops like a station of the cross ways. From the top I can see the trees of heaven grow big here, unlike the one my Dad planted when I was born which uprooted our house by the time I was 21 and had to be taken down. And here’s one I don’t know. Maybe a cottonwood like the one which grew in the center of our neighborhood. You could hear its leaves speaking before the breeze touched you on the ground. --Its bark like a river of lizards…. Another tree from my childhood helps me down from the mound. We called it the cigar tree, with its elephant eared leaves and brown long seedpods. I used to climb its root, let it pachyderm foot me up, away from home and all. Off the path a coil of old film surrounds a branch the rain took down, mossed all around. Before I am out again a cardinal sings of his land and a little fungus wheel spindles up at me. Even the fragile splendor for a while. Crushing them only releases spores for more.

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