The woman sat in the half-run-down wooden shack day after day. Each morning she awoke early, when the sky was just beginning to flush nectarine-and-peach. The air was fresh in the hills, and in the mornings, a thin veil of mist clung to the sky. She, herself, was once a bride, veiled, but that was many years ago. Her own cheeks were then plump as the grapes that hung in her arbor each summer. Now they were withered, faintly - as apples plucked and left indoors too long uneaten.

Each morning, the woman would rise, shake clean the quilt on her little bed and pat it down. When one lives alone, one should keep one's home tidy, no? It is one's responsibility. If she noticed any motes of dust passing in the wedge of sun that stretched through the window, she would sweep later and perhaps mop the floor. Outside, dust was fine, though, and she would sit in her Adirondack chair watch the sparrows taking baths in the dirt, scrabbling and tossing up cloudbursts of dust with their feathers. Oh drab little brown birds, they were, but so spritely! This particularly morning she had half a loaf of stale bread that she had made several days ago, and she tore little strips off and tossed them to her darlings. What proud little feathered breasts they had, and they received the bread like monks receiving alms, not like beggars. A dignity. They were tame around her and would come close to her old hands. Sometimes, on mornings like these, she saw them as her own little communicants, every once in a while startling the day into song.

She had known many songs, having lived a long life. Had tended her garden each day, and sat out each afternoon. First with her husband, for many years. He was a long and angular, with the big hands of a farmer. Clever hands. He had built the two Adirondack chairs many years ago. She remembered how carefully he had cut and sanded each wooden slat, joined them together, made sure everything was plumb and solid before, finally, staining the wood a deep and satisfying brown. The two chairs, when left alone at night, faced each other at angles, like conspirators. But after he died, she had no use for the second chair. She did, however, need heat and the crackling of a fire in the winter time, so she chopped up her husband's Adirondack chair for firewood. It gave off a peculiarly beautiful smell as it burned.

When she died, she thought, who would chop up her chair and use it as firewood? It would be a waste to leave it. There was only one thing for it, then. She would will herself not to die. Surely such things had been done? She came to this momentous decision sitting in the chair with the sparrows at her feet. It would be difficult, perhaps, but not impossible. And yes, it had been done before. Hadn't the nymph Daphne, when pursued by a lecherous god, begged to change into a laurel tree? Her wish was granted. There were, then, precedents. And so, the woman drew down her brow in thought; she was no nymph, with no god to call on, but perhaps she could will the transformation herself.

Her hands, she noticed, as they curved around the arms of the chair had the bulging and sinewy unevenness of knotted wood; her skin, the calloused texture of bark. Reaching down, she unbuckled her leather sandals and tossed them aside, briefly scattering the sparrows at her feet. She returned her feet to the dust. How cool it felt, how good, beneath her toes. With eyes closed, she thought of her grape arbor - the greens and purples shot through with light. She sat and thought of sunlight and air and water. Surely, this is how one becomes a tree. She sat and thought, and sat and thought.

Had anyone been looking - watching that old shack on the hill that summer afternoon - they would have noticed a curious sight: an old woman, seated in a chair, turning into a tree. She thought of air and light and water, of green and purple. Slowly, her toes elongated. They grew down into the dirt under her, and fanned out into the earth. Over the course of the afternoon, her calves hardened, and the trunk of her body too. Her arms became rigid; small tendrils reached out from them and wrapped around the arms of the chair, so that woman and chair became entwined - one wooden entity. The hardness stole on softly, gradually, in imperceptible increments. She was thinking of sunlight and water and air, but noticed that it had become harder to think. A dull heaviness. As thought left, a crown of branches rose from the sides of her head and leaves unfurled in bright green flags. She tried to cling to anything, anything, anything human. Whitman was all she could remember: I guess it must be the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful green stuff woven. A fanfare of many green leaves, crosshatched, allowing the sun to fall through them in soft flashes.

And then there was just silence, and light, and a strange, buckled tree standing next to a wooden shack on a hill. The tame sparrows had not flown too far. Gradually, they returned - there were still specks of bread under the shade of the tree. What tree it was, was unclear. Not willow or ailanthus or oak. Not birch or beech or cherry. But under the tree there was still dirt for the sparrows to bathe their wings. And in the evening, when the sky grew dark, they rose up to the old tree limbs above them and roosted in the green.