The stripped and shapely Maple grieves The ghosts of her Departed leaves. The ground is hard, As hard as stone. The year is old, The birds are flown.

The ending is where the reader discovers whether he has been reading the same story the writer thought he was writing.

The true New Yorker secretly believes that people living anywhere else have to be, in some sense, kidding.

The crooked little tomato branches, pulpy and pale as if made of cheap green paper, broke under the weight of so much fruit; there was something frantic in suc…