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69 Yard Work Sixty degrees and sunny, mid-March, an ambivalent wind coaxing raked leaves loose from flowerbeds. I’m at the overgrown hedge, gripping a limb cutter. Snow-weighted branches curve down into a dull, monochromatic rainbow. I’m hacking the branches down to the stem so the bush can live, so its leaves can flourish and protect us from the eyes of neighbors. I stretch up and slash a defiant bough, wrapped in the arms of the wisteria, coiled around a drainpipe, and think of me and my first girlfriend: two malnourished, rootless things clinging to one another and calling it love. I wince and hack deeper into the bramble. A pile of severed branches waist-high. Thorns tug at my sleeves. The truest version of love I ever saw was a pair of palm trees, twenty feet apart, tall and dignified in the desert sky, their leaves brushing when wind conspired towards them, their roots touching like toes underground. ...

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