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63 The Plum Tree for Carolyn Sachs Like Shiva, many-armed, already ancient when my friend bought the place, the tree’s cracked limbs clawed the air, where nine feeders hosted generations—noisy chickadee and siskin, nuthatch and woodpecker. Desiccated, unyielding, in spring the tree drew indigo bunting and grosbeak to its withering. Year after year, she could not bear to cut it down. When a sharp-shinned hunted from a wire, the farmyard emptied, feeders like out-of-season ornaments decorating a leaflessness. One year, thin saplings rose around the great dead tree, celebrants about a maypole, and the sweet scent of blossoming returned in the miniature plum trees the birds seeded. Young keepers of the temple fire, garlanded in white, they circled the goddess-tree, their fallen petals marking a sacred wheel, within which the dead cede ground to the living. ...

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