Harmony

Don’t go over the corner. I guess I’ll train her the other way.

This is the three-showers-before-six-in-the-afternoon time of year. The aforementioned is a compound adjective. I think they’re playful, whimsical and light. But I’m serious. 

I met a couple tree service guys with a truckload of wood chips just in time. Yesterday three men helped me to upright the pergola that had fallen the night before. None of us master craftsmen. Hell, none of us are even skilled in knowing much about gravity other than standing. More wood. More screws. That’s the refrain I knew.

Before this I stopped to see what might need to be done at the lot on Needle Street. The fig tree I planted years ago had been stripped and sawed back. The neighbor to the right threw limbs of the fig and limbs of Chinese tallow that landed on the guava and ice cream bean. 

I don’t like to tell other people what to do. Well…yes, I do, but I know the futility of doing so. The door of the rental closed. I yelled, “Hey.” Tried to ask who threw this. A man older than me, maybe sixty, holding a forty ounce in a brown paper bag, said, “We just moved in.” 

A lady approached. I asked for the landlord’s number. Both said they didn’t know who did it, who threw the things in the lot. 

The woman told me, “The landlord said she be around tomorrow.” 

“Can I get her number?”

“She said tell you she be around tomorrow.”

The next morning, this morning, the tree man got a hold of me. He said he had that truckload of wood chips. I was just thinking how if I had the space cleaned up, if it was clear what grew where and why, maybe this wouldn’t have happened. I was thinking the branches could feed and mulch what already grew. Maybe the landlord did me a favor.

On Irk Street, a man weed whacked what was growing down to a half inch. This is where I really find myself wanting to give advice. I want to say that we cannot live well surrounded by death, and killing everything that lives cannot be good for the soul of the killer. Now I, too, use a weed whacker, and I know that doing one thing changes everything.

I wonder whether there might be a way to interest people, whether there might be a walk through, whether people might see that those grasses that come up in clumps are trying to reach down and feed life. Even common ragweed is loved by the sparrows. The bees need the goldenrod. I heard they drive trucks through the neighborhood spraying poison because people are worried about mosquitoes. And I know that that implies that the bees drive trucks, but you know what I mean.

I heard the mayor got in a fight in a bar bathroom.

I have heard and seen many things and cannot say that I have an answer. Especially for those not asking questions. I do have a question. I do wonder why more questions aren’t being asked. I wonder how water became a commodity. I wonder at the difficulty of trying to hunt down nutrients in a grocery store. I wonder how something so simple seems to go unseen. 

How can one not know that it is from the soil we come and back to the soil we will go?

This might be too much for 1:11 on a Friday afternoon, so perhaps I’ll make a wish. And my wish is this. So get ready to wiggle your nose or tap your wand or do whatever you do to manifest. My wish is to see those around me create, to see them become whole, mentally, physically and spiritually.

I’ll take what the land gives and show what I know, and find ways, even without rain, to eat what grows, to make tea, to dry, to store, to ask, to share, to know, that even anger can be broken down and made into a space where a seed can be planted.