We Are Getting Somewhere

We Are Getting Somewhere

Waging battle against oxalis and making lemon meringue pie.

I’m stooped over weeding oxalis when I’m startled by Irene’s voice behind me. I usually hear the melancholy complaint the gate between our gardens makes, as effective as a buzzer. I see she left the gate open. I hope Penelope, her terrier, stays put in her yard.

“I didn’t win Powerball,” she says. “In case you’re wondering.”

“That’s a shame,” I say.

“You’re smart. You probably didn’t waste your money.”

“How many tickets did you buy?”

“Two hundred.”

“You spent $400?”

“I did and you know what? I didn’t get the Powerball number once. Ten. Not once. You’d think the odds would be against that. But I’m not good with math.”

I’m no better with math than Irene. And $380 worth more sensible. I bought five tickets. I matched the Powerball number. Once. The only match. You’d think the odds would be against that, too. I tossed the ticket after a glance.

“I got four numbers right twice,” Irene says.

“What do you get for that?”

“A cheap thrill. And nagging from Pop about throwing away money. He grew up in the Depression, and he sits on money like a broody hen. I remind him he’s not going to live forever; he could bump it up a notch. You can’t win if you don’t play. I tell him he’s acting like Johnny O’Toole.”

“Who’s Johnny O’Toole?”

“One of the O’Toole brothers. Bachelors. They lived south of town on the creek and anything that went up for sale, which was pretty much everything in that part of Oklahoma, they bought. Somebody asked Johnny, ‘What are you going to do with it all? You can’t take it with you.’ And Johnny said, ‘Who says I’m going somewhere?’ Well, he went somewhere; they all did, one after the next. Some Minnesota third cousin who never laid eyes on them inherited all the land. Talk about winning the lotto. George, the youngest brother, put the moves on me once. I could have married him, but it was a package deal—him, his brothers, and his mom and the smelly shack on the creek. But I’d be in the clover about now, wouldn’t I? Lord, it would not have been worth it. Me and Pop, we’re doing fine as we are.”

I never doubted that since the moment they arrived from Oklahoma paying cash for Rita’s house and words like mineral rights and fracking seeped into the neighborhood gossip stream.

“I tell Pop the lotto money goes to the schools, but he says that’s crap. He’s probably right. It goes to government bureaucrats sitting on their butts. I guess I can support that,” she laughs.

“How’s your lemon tree doing?” I ask. A whiff of politics and I change the subject. It’s an election year and Irene has taken to the spectacle of electioneering as she does to any reality show. She tries to get me and her father on opposite sides of a table hoping, I guess, we’ll do some mud wrestling like the big boys, but neither of us takes the bait. Once was plenty. He was not impressed by my logic and moral certainty, nor I by his, and that’s where it stands, going nowhere. Often we are in our respective gardens at the same time in the morning, and we behave as if we are unaware of each other’s existence. He was out earlier today doing some pruning. He generally works an hour or two and disappears into the house, presumably to be in his pew in time for Fox News.

“The lemon tree is loaded,” Irene says.

I know it’s loaded. I can see the profusion of yellow from where I stand, and my mouth waters anticipating the first bite of the lemon meringue pie I want to make in honor of Phyllis. It’s curious how missing people comes and goes, often according to season. Winter spring summer fall. Phyllis. Aunt Dot. Dad. Gussie. Lately I’ve been missing Rita. When she lived next door, I walked over and picked lemons to my belly’s content. Thankfully, Rita has not joined the O’Toole brothers in the great Elsewhere but is in Santa Barbara, delighted with the new chapter of her life.

Phyllis’ pie recipe is an ordinary lemon pie recipe, so why were hers so extraordinary? Easy answer. Ripe Meyer lemons and her joy in them. I haven’t made a lemon pie for years, so I may be rusty in the crust department. I want to impress my niece who doesn’t get from-the-tree lemon meringue pie at home in Kansas. In two days, she arrives for a weeklong visit. Her coming is also the incentive to battle the oxalis. I am about to surrender. Who knows, she may think the oxalis meadow is pretty. It’s certainly verdant.

My brother tells me my niece is “going through a hard time.” I picture cutting her a fat slice of lemon pie, large enough to banish darkest melancholy. I am vaguely applying the same principles of good medicine that Hildegard of Bingen used in the 12th century: to balance cool and dry, administer hot and wet. If life has no tang, apply a large dose of lemon juice.

Why do I merely hint and not ask Irene directly for lemons? I don’t want to feel indebted (like someone who grew up in a depression). If last year was predictive, in about two months when the lemons are falling off and making a moldy mess on the patio, she will offer me some.

“Why don’t you hire a gardener?” Irene breaks in. “You’re getting nowhere fast. That’s a shitload of weeds.”

“I will when I win the lotto.”

“Sure. You’re like my father. A penny-pincher.”

Little Penelope, Irene’s terrier, ears as sharp as her eyesight is dim, thinking she has been summoned by her mistress, materializes. Her sniffer is as keen as her ears, and when she discovers eau-de-Faro she snarls and bares canines. “Penny-pants, you silly girl,” Irene says lifting her up for a snuzzle. “You know our neighbor.” She does. Pretty Penny knows and loathes neighbor Faro. Yap, yap. Grrr. Lemme get my teeth in him.

“Looks like I have to take you home,” Irene says, a result entirely welcome.

When Irene closes the garden gate, there is no melancholy sigh. I don’t need to wonder at this for long. “Pop oiled your hinges,” she yells before she goes in her back door. “He’ll send you a bill.”

Is she serious?

I’m only half glad she’s gone. She was a distraction and I am desperate. I don’t have a fresh impulse to bring to the tedium of weeding oxalis. Done it too many years, two or three times a season. I want some fine fresh thoughts I can suck the juice out of.

How about some resentment? I told Irene that I bought the lemon tree almost 30 years ago as a birthday present for Rita; a 15-gallon beauty. I dug the hole, planted it. Irene’s response, unsaid but unmistakable, was what are you going to do for me?

I could get in my pickup and drive down the hill to the market to get a dozen lemons but that idea has no appeal. I don’t want to get near my pickup today.

So I continue to weed. I am getting somewhere. Into. An. Alternate reality. The interviewer asks, “With your mega-millions, Faro, will we ever see you on your knees weeding oxalis?” And there I am, cameras in my face, having to ponder. If I hadn’t been out here on my knees this past hour, I would have missed out on something ineffable; the transcendent sweetness of the garden after last night’s showers. (Such generous and gentle rains we’ve been having. Deep bow.) The daphne is crazy with blossoms as never before, who knows why, spicing the air with what Hildegard of Bingen called viriditas. Green vitality. The force that through the green fuse drives the flower. Warm and wet. If I weren’t out here compelled to weed, I’d be inside in front of a screen (cool and dry) reading a worthless article like the one about the lotto winners whose lives were wrecked by their windfall. “Sometimes I wish we could give it all back,” one said.

My hands are bleeding from the pricks of Dyckia “Burgundy Ice.” Unquestionably, with my new winnings I will hire a gardener. I will hire an army of them. I will redo the garden completely since, now that I admit it, I am sick of it, disgusted even. It will never look the way I want it to. I will never know the way I want it to look. I will turn my back to it until the renovation is complete. I will start a magazine. Learn to play the accordion. Go to Brazil. Fix the roof. Work in a leper colony.

My back is sore, my hands bloody, and I didn’t win the lotto. Here’s the backup plan. I will invent a totally organic herbicide, a dash of vinegar, spritz of garlic plus a magic component that targets only oxalis. Shazam. It will fly off shelves of nurseries up and down the coast. I will be in clover. The good kind.

Where did all this oxalis come from? I wish we could give it all back.

If you don’t know where you are going, any road will get you there.
—Lewis Carroll

My niece Annabelle is 16. So young. She is nervous around me. She has spent most of the afternoon on the deck, caressing her pink phone. Now I know that this is what is culturally acceptable in every situation, but I still expected more. She hasn’t texted me yet to ask what time dinner is, so I suppose that’s good sign that at some point there will be conversation. I can’t blame her for wanting to be outside in the sunshine, though, having escaped a Plains blizzard.

“Your neighbor asked me to give these to you,” she says coming in the back door. She holds up a bulging white plastic bag. “Lemons,” she says.

“Irene gave you those?”

“No, an old guy. He said to tell you they were from Clem.”

Strange. Giving them to her. Giving them at all. I’m not unpleased. There are a lot of lemons in that bag.

“Do you like lemon pies?” I ask Annabelle.

“Who doesn’t?”

“Do you want to help me make one? Or two?”

“I guess. I don’t know how.”

I maintain the fiction that everything I know about pie dough I am learning from what her phone tells us as I watch her overwork the dough. The crust will be tough as leather, but what does it matter? As the crusts pre-bake, I juice the lemons for the filling and Annabelle gets engrossed again in her screen. I hand her the bowl containing the separated egg whites and a whisk, something for each hand.

“Here,” I say, picking up the pink phone from the table, “I’m going to put this thing in the living room so we don’t get flour on it.” The look of alarm in her eyes is intense but lasts less than eight seconds, which, they say, is the new average attention span.

I take over when her wrist gets tired. She believes it’s not going to happen, the white-capped peaks won’t ever form, and I’m starting to think so, too, when, shazam, we are somewhere, in the high Sierra amid snowy peaks. In minutes both pies are in the oven, working on their tans.

I’m wondering if, after we’ve had our fill, I could talk her into helping me do some weeding.

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R.E. Faro is a poet and essayist, and a longtime contributor to The Monthly. Read his blog at berrypicking.wordpress.com.

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