"Write about green places."
Natalie Goldberg, Writing Down the Bones


Miller wondered why her hometown was called Western Springs. She had never seen a spring. It would be more fitting for the town to be named after a tree. This place was nothing, but a tree town with big lawns and enormous maples that visiting city dwellers mistook for the county. Miller looked around at all of the trees that lined the front yards towering over the houses and draping over the streets are red buds, maples, honey suckles, birch, oak, crabapple, magnolias, and evergreen shrubs in all shapes and sizes. Strip away the too-close-together houses, then you have the country. In the fall, it snows red maple’s helicopter seedpods. Every seven years, the cicada bug invades this sleepy suburb; for weeks, locals talk about the invasion instead of the weather.