Together

Jelly palm that killed a rat and nourished us.

Sometimes I have an idea what I am going to write and sometimes I let the music guide me. I try to open my heart and ask. Sometimes I try to connect two events or more and don’t know until the end how they connect. Sometimes I don’t even know then.

Yesterday I cut moringa trunks and branches into four-foot pieces after taking them down from Mystery. I used a post-hole digger to go into the earth on Needle Street and then used my left hand to gather and put the sand and dirt back into the hole so as not to infect the open blister on my right. 

Today I still had some of those branches when I drove outside of the city to a place called Westwego, to a neighborhood of lawns, to a man I met years ago. He once raised beagles to run through the woods in a game. He was a part of a club that did this, and if I remember, this was one of the ways he connected with his father.

What I appreciate about Will is his ability to watch. He took from the woods where he used to take his beagle. He took the plants that he noticed attracted the bees. He kept what I gave him growing for years and in the area that surrounds his house there is a patch that is not mowed. In this patch there exists abundance. There exists relationships.

Will fed me jelly palm fruit that had fallen to the ground. Near the edge where this fruit collected in the yard, a dead rat lay. A medium sized rat.

Will said, “I’m going to have to bury him”

I said, “He probably drank himself to death, eating the fermented berries.”

We walked around Will’s yard and considered where the sun rose and set. We considered East and West. We consider where small pecan trees cast shadows and whether two were needed.

I stuck cuttings of moringa and tithonia into the ground on the Southwest corner of the brick house. I told him how we could plant within what already existed. He said that’s exactly what he wanted to do.

In a hot spot along the edge of a concrete driveway, crepe myrtle sprouted from a runner, from a root underground, that came from a neighbor’s tree. I don’t know how much good crepe myrtle might be. I know burning the wood emits toxic fumes. I know that Will does not want the tree in that space, but he is like me. He has difficulty cutting things down because one thing affects everything.

Will’s mom was there. She is 73. We shared coffee at the kitchen table. She said their family were hunters and trappers, that her grandmother grew everything for eight families. She said that she knew how to make hats out of palm fronds. 

I should have mentioned that Will’s elderberry trees were loaded with big, black elderberries, and maybe this came from an energy passed down from family, from the way his mom told me how they used to take elderberry leaves if somebody got dizzy from the heat. You put those leaves in your hat and they cool you down.

“There’s some reason they call it the Elder Berry,” Will said.

I had never thought of it like this. There is always something to learn. I think that I am going somewhere to be paid to consult and what happens is that I learn more about the world. I learn more about myself.

I still feel strange charging money for knowledge that I believe is intuitive, for plants that are the right of everyone to have, and yet I know what I am doing makes a difference, at least to one man who tattoos from his home on the West Bank.

I know this because when I left Will I stopped at Hong Kong market for longan, to eat and to save seeds.A man approached me.

“You that guy,” he said. “That guy grows food on instagram.”

I was standing back by the longan. He told me he felt like he was meeting a celebrity, that he watched my videos, that he started eating healthier, feeding his family better food, and working out. 

I had to show him the longan. I told him how to pop open the skin. I told him they were easy to plant. I have more that I want to offer him because in that moment, in that market, he changed my life.