We’re very good at killing things, I think as I drive past the neighbor’s on a day they’ve dumped a deer from the trunk bed onto the driveway, its legs bent under it. We’ll forget our age if nothing around us ages. We’ll forget everything but what it is to have nothing hurt. We’re burning all the wood. We’ve stopped bringing our children to the temples. We’re careful. We keep them upright. They have never tasted oak leaves that flake into the last days of October. They can’t imagine ghosts. They must ask to taste sap dripping from the veins of a tree struggling to be warm, must ask what a spirit is. Sometimes we kill the children too. Or maybe they’re lost. Thankfully, our memories are short. We’ve never walked wood worn down by centuries of feet, and frankly it’s impossible to say what’s true anymore. We burned all the pictures, burned the children too, and who could blame us if we didn’t check the news while it was happening? We were in the garden, tending the squash vines. Who can hold every pain in every place in the world in real time, after all? The children disappeared, that’s all, the way any coneflower loses its petals in autumn. Life finds a way, and we love sad songs. Love a good cause. Love coming through on the other side. Love to honor our scars and marvel at our resilience, our blood like any tree’s blood, rushing at winter’s retreat, keeping us upright while snow still hides the seeds and the mothers and the rot.