Outside her bedroom window four graceful elm trees lined to the very edge of Anna Bowen's yard. The tree closest to her bedroom was Anna's morning welcome. Branches were coming to Springtime abundance with hair-like leaves that moved in unhurried circles. Mid-May wind played through the tapered top limbs that marked the western edge of the sidewalk. A slim woman, sixty-six her last birthday, her silver hair escaping its sleep net, Anna stretched then leaned across the tall, walnut-burled bedboard to look beyond ecru, translucent curtains. She watched the larger, lower boughs swaying hardly at all, their inertia balanced the force of the wind. Anna Bowen smiled; the breeze slowed, a few leaves shake as if in defiance. The sky was shaded by clouds outside her sight.

Anna sat up in bed, massaged her knees and stirred a bit too quickly. She felt a twitch around her left hip. She turned her head and caught her reflection in the dresser mirror, startled for a moment to recognize her mother's face. She thought--that's me, not her.

Anna loved the fading sepia snapshot of her mother at sixteen, her large brown eyes, demurely downcast, her golden complexion reflecting dark skinned ancestors that Grandmam didn't talk about but Grandpa did. A handmade voile dress skimmed Anna's mother's ankles. In the photographs her mother's dark hair was pulled back, wispy curls behind her ears.

Anna pulled her own silver hair on top of her head and moved her head side to side before the mirror. "No, Mother was delicate. I do not look delicate," she said, in the audible but quiet voice of a person who lives alone.

She glanced through the window to the nearest elm tree. It was her favorite, shielding the two others from the North winds. The larger tree's strong branches did not sway when touched by miniature whirlwinds that played through budding, young leaves. Higher up, smaller, lighter limbs twisted, bent way down and arched up. Anna nodded in tempo with the dancing green.

Suddenly, motors and voices outside her window broke the quiet. She pulled the curtain aside. The glass panes were old, rippled, Victorian green. Four men were climbing down from a yellow truck to the sidewalk. The men, wearing orange coveralls, wide leather belts and turtle shaped, yellow plastic hats, circled the tree at the edge of Anna's yard.

The men stood with their legs wide apart, not like office workers who hold their legs closer together. Two of the men walked around the sturdy tree. He stubbed cigarettes into the concrete sidewalk. A short, bowlegged man with hairy arms pulled himself into the cab of a machine that looked like a ride at the County Fair Grounds.

"Come on man, We've got a dozen of these damn things to top today," he said.

A skinny one on the ground said, "The Hell you say. I know. You hurry it up, jackass." He laughed, coughing, spitting, his cigarette seemingly growing like a glowing tongue between his lips.

The whirring engine raised a rattling, metal cage to the top of the tree. With powerful, even thrusts the man in the cage sawed through the branches at the top of the elm. Birds resting in nearby trees rose, startled from their perches. A few settled back, some flew erratically then abandoned their havens. Through the closed window Anna heard flat thuds. Sawdust floated onto a man's arms, turning red hairs to white. Telephone wires along the parkway, wavered in controlled rocking. A wide, curving "U" quickly altered the natural pyramid of the treetop.

Anna knelt on the bedcovers, holding the window ledge as it warmed under her grasp. Fragile branches crashed through the foliage, snapping, hitting the sidewalk, the yard and the street with hollow thumps.

"Good Heavens, they're killing my tree," Anna said, a moan rising, unconsciously, as she watched one then another branch fall. She moved away from the window, not wanting to hear and see what offended her.

The kitchen clock chimed eight a.m. Jennie, Anna's favorite boarding student came downstairs and knocked at Anna's door. "Can I get you something before I leave for classes, Miss Bowen? A glass of juice?" Jennie's Jamiacan speech was a pleasing break to the noise outside.

"No thanks, dear, I'll be up soon." Anna forced a cherry tone. "Have a good day, dear." She went to her dresser and sat in her curved back boudoir seat.

Jennie smiled. A pleasant fragrance lingered after she left. After her mother died, Anna rented the top floor bedrooms to graduate students from the university. She didn't want her girls to think she was out of step and time so she listening to the music tumbling down the stairs from their stereos. Once in a while she'd say, "So and so's new CD is good."

She tried to ignore the rasp of the saw, the banter between the men.

"Heave it this way, man."

"Catch it, Man. It's gonna hit the truck."

"Damn you, man."

Anna was not surprised that thoughts of her grandfather intruded, his gentlemanly voice contrasted with the casual, rough language she was hearing. She picked up her pearl handled hairbrush and began to brush her hair, slowly counting to one hundred. She wanted to shut out the noise and disruption outside her window.

Grandpa had told Anna that she was from a family of thoroughbreds. Before she was old enough for school her grandfather took her to the County Fair to watch the horse races and the garlands hung on the winner's necks. "Thoroughbreds are swift and tough," her grandpa said.

Anna turned back to the window. She struck her fist on the hard bureau top. "Grandpa, I'm mad. It's not easy to always be a lady." She blew on the side of the hand she'd bruised, saying, "I'll think of something."

Anna's called her grandmother Grandmam. Grandman crocheted blue or purple and white table doilies, made wedding ring quilts and didn't understand why her granddaughter would have dried mud on her slipper heels. Grandmam said that ladies should walk on the sidewalk and avoid mud when they were assisted into Packard or Buick automobiles. For her grandmother and grandfather Anna wanted to be a "lady."

On her way to Sunday School a tiny Anna bent to blow dust from her black patent leather T-straps. She was careful not to soil the lace-bordered handkerchief her grandmother had sewn with invisible stitches. "Just like a lady," Anna said to her mother.

One warm day Anna's mother called from inside the front door, "Anna, you and I are going downtown to have our own special time while Brother and Father are working on the car."

Anna sat in her cane bottomed chair near the front steps, frowned upward, away from her embroidery hoop, its red and yellow threads waiting to be tied and cut, "Good," she said. "I'm not getting this." She didn't say that she'd rather be working on the car with her father and brother.

"Mother, is grown up the same as being a thoroughbred?" Anna asked, her face serious, even to the crease in her forehead, just like her grandpa's.

"Papa's been telling you family stories again," Myrtle said, with a laugh. "I see. I suppose you can say being grown up is being a thoroughbred."

The clanging of the streetcar bell echoed Anna's singing all the way downtown. "Thoroughbred, ta da. I'm a thoroughbred, ta da." She didn't notice for several years that Mother always took her all the way to the back seat, even when there were empty ones in the front.

On Christmas Eve, one week before Anna's eighth birthday, her father held a finger to his lips and beckoned to Anna's brother, Stephen, Jr., and Anna to follow him to the spare room. He showed them a shining, sterling silverware service he had bought for their mother's Christmas gift. Anna ran her fingers over the carved roses on the heavy, gleaning handles. She could hardly wait to see her mother's face on Christmas morning, but she kept the secret.

Myrtle loved her silverware. The roses complemented the Wedgwood she'd inherited from Grandmam's family. Anna liked to help clean the silver, the pink polish turning the handles black, then her mother plunging a handful into hot water. The jumble tinkled and sparkled like stars, pink clouds dissolving and floating away. When Anna dried the spoons she made silly faces at her upside down reflection in the curves.

Anna was on her way to the bathroom one cool, early May night nearly five months after her father gave her mother the beautiful Christmas gift. Anna heard her father say, "Myrtle, I want a divorce. I'm going to marry Peggy." Anna knew Peggy. She worked in Anna's father's grocery store and was twenty-four years old.

Her mother said, "Stephen, some men feel they want to have a little fling when they get to be about forty years old, but they don't break their families because of it."

Anna walked slowly on bare feet back to her bed. She did not really need to go to the bathroom.

Father built his new wife a house in the newest part of the city. To Anna, his new wife, Peggy, wasn't pretty like her mother. Peggy's bosom was flat and her ankles were thick, although she did have long, black eyelashes.

Stephen, Jr. visited his father and his new wife when they invited him. When Anna was invited she said she had a sore throat, or a stomachache. Her father and Peggy stopped asking her.

Anna's father lived ten years more. Peggy, with the thick ankles, inherited the grocery store, the new house and two cars. Myrtle sold the sterling silver service to Mr. Poliakoff's Jewelry and Pawnshop. She kept the Wedgwood for Anna.

Anna winced and put her silver handled brush on her dresser at the sound of another limb falling so heavily the pearl handled mirror on her dresser shivered against its mirrored tray. The best and worst memories could not stop the intrusion of the morning.

On her dresser, in its special place, stood a six inch high Tennessee Walker, its tail and neck arched, its mahogany mane flowing backwards, one front leg held high, pawing the air. Anna's grandpa had carved the horse for Anna's sixth birthday. He always made her birthday special, coming as it did only a week before Christmas.

Anna's comb, brush mirror and perfume atomizer set neatly on a purple and white doily in the shadow of the graceful horse. Anna lifted the animal, stroked the skillfully carved mane that flowed from a polished tulipwood neck. She closed her eyes thinking how Grandpa said that her neck was slender and graceful like the necks of the horses they both loved.

Like limbs blown by intermittent gusts, Anna Bowen was pliable and strong, bending and responding to life's breezes and gales with equanimity. She would never think or say that the diminished money she and her mother had was a problem. Grandpa offered to help her with college, but Anna saw that Grandmam was beginning to forget things. She knew Grandpa would need all he had to take care of her. So, instead of the lady's finishing school that had been Myrtle's alma mata, she went to Atlanta to business college.

Men had found Anna attractive. Three asked her to marry them. The last one was Harold Brickman, her employer at the insurance company. Anna said no to him just as she did to the pharmacist, Ralph Peek, and James Swain, who inherited his father's funeral home. No one of them was gentle as Grandpa, or thoughtful as a father who gave sterling silver surprises, even if he did walk away four months later.

Stephen, Jr. stopped introducing Anna to his friends and business associates when Anna was thirty-five. Stephen's wife said that Anna was "just too discriminating."

Anna was a bookkeeper, promoted to accountant, the last ten years before she retired, usually with a group of people she did not really know. She took vacations in Greece, Italy, Ghana and the Yucatan. She looked for horse racing tracks when she traveled. She never gambled. Her greeting cards were her own prints of winners crossing the finish line, nostrils flaring, their eyes straining.

The noise outside Anna's window began to fade. "Finally, they're leaving." she said. The crew moved, in almost military cadence, up the hill to the next corner. In the back of the yellow truck a pile of cut boughs bounced, leaves curling in shocked separation. Anna frowned at the receding line, angered by the naked tree, the ease with which years of growth had been discarded. Her mouth tightened, her fingernails dug into the windowsill. The curtains covered the ledge that smelled of lemon oil from yesterday's dusting. Thousands of mornings dreams flowed into Anna Bowen's waking, finishing nighttime work, bringing closure to her yesterdays. She knew what her memories meant. Her grandparents, her mother, even her father, inhabited and gave meaning to a life that became stronger in its remembering.

"I will do something," she said, as she tied the belt of her robe with a sharp tug.

Quick footsteps reverberated from her kitchen. Anna sat at her desk, wads of crumpled paper in a pile beside her. "Oh, Jennie, I had no idea. It's past noon. Now, don't be worried, I took a break and had my breakfast."

"I smell the toast and coffee, Miss Bowen," Jennie said. " I see you're writing." She walked close to Anna and pulled the wool throw closer around Anna's shoulders.

"I'm furious about what our city officials are doing to my hometown. They're mutilating the grand old trees," Anna said. "I'm writing to the City Council, and to the News Gazette. I'm going to picket the Court House just like I did for Civil Rights and I don't care if anyone else in this town joins me or not."

"You're some thoroughbred, Miss Bowen." Jennie wrapped her arms around Anna's shoulders. "Your Grandpa would be proud,"

Anna looked up from her writing and winked. "He is," she said.