I'm Maggie Smith, and this is the slowdown.

When I was a small child, in the house we lived in until I was about six years old, there was a large willow tree in the backyard.

I loved that tree and spent a lot of time climbing in it, hanging from its limbs, and playing in its shade.

My next childhood bedroom had a large pine tree right outside the window.

My parents still live in that house, and a few years back, in a terrible windstorm, the pine came crashing down.

It felt like the end of an era.

My bedroom now looks out onto the neighbor's two magnolia trees,

which are full of big, beautiful flowers in the spring.

Yes, the willow, the pine, and the magnolias have all made their way into my poems.

They're not just part of the landscape.

They're part of my idea of home.

I think that's why I connected so much with today's poem.

It's a kind of love poem to a beloved tree and to the sense of home it created.

Hackberry by Cecily Parks A place I love is about to disappear.

When the summer sunset drives into the west side of our house, burning with a heat we've been

warned about, I look out the two square windows that are filled with hackberry leaves, whose greens

vary according to light and wind and whose shade composes

a sort of room for us under the tree. It's said that those who sleep under a hackberry

will be protected from evil spirits. And I can't stop thinking of how the

four of us for years blithely slept the sleep of the protected, as if there were no other sleep.

And how, in the daytime the tree arranged its shade

to let hearts of sunlight fall on the stone path underneath it.

...