Home Entertainment Game Technology Advertisement Part 2: For eight years, my parents made me leave the house every time my brother brought his fiance over; Mom said, “She comes from a good family, don’t embarrass us”; Dad added, “Just disappear for the weekend”; I did; then one weekend, I never came back; it took them four years to find out where I went.

“If I wasn't in the photograph, nobody had to answer questions.”

“If I wasn't in the obituary, the story stayed neat.”

I looked toward my parents.

They did not look away.

“But neat stories are not always true.”

Then I took my pocketknife.

Carefully scraped a tiny patch of bark from a lower branch.

Green.

I smiled.

“When I was eighteen, Ruth taught me how to check a tree everyone thought was dead.”

Ruth called from her chair:

“I taught you not to butcher bark in public.”

Everyone laughed.

I continued.

“She scraped it and said:

Brown means dead. Green means she's living.”

I looked at the dogwood.

Then at the land beyond the church.

My nursery.

My friends.

My life.

“For a long time, other people wrote the dates under my name.”

“They decided where my story ended.”

“They were wrong.”

I stepped away from the tree.

“No one gets to call a living thing dead just because its life is inconvenient.”