After the brook, I turn back. I am on snowshoes. Yesterday's snowstorm has frozen into an unloveable cushion-less surface. A mess of a landscape. Bark litter, branches broken, beat up trees. I am irritable in the woods today.

Indoors, leading my weekly writer's group, I let my mood loosen and lift. In the sunlit living room of a friend, planted on the cushioned couch, I give permission and receive it. We enter our imaginations – our notebooks. We open to blank and white, a page of clean is brilliant: what is possible?

I offer a prompt and write myself into the shape and form of a leafy and fruited, rooted and hearty tree. I write my mood into another season entirely.

I am a tree of my choosing, and an apple is fine.