Heads Up

Moringa leaves and flowers

I don’t know him so well. I went to his house once and got bit by mosquitoes while he pointed out all of the plants that would be loaded up and brought to the big sale at City Park. He told me that his 84 year old mom was really the grand dame of the business his dad started forty years ago and kept up until he died.

He started with a text. Said he was in the hospital and that he wanted to leave but they wouldn’t let him. When we met for the first time his foot was swollen and he could not walk. This hospital visit was different. 

He said it started with his infected foot and turned into his kidneys.

“Trying to drink enough water,” he said. 

I responded with well wishes and a promise to be there to load the plants for the market. Then he called.

After a quick catch up of how he was feeling better he said, “Do you think you could go by the house and water the plants?”

Now I live way over in the 9th Ward and he lives way over almost to the airport in Kenner. Still I have a hard time telling a man in the hospital that I cannot help him, but there was no way. 

He said, “I understand.”

I like to think that this random relationship that started by me opening up to possibility is an opportunity to see what my future might be like if  I don't have other options, if I do not take care of myself.

This morning I must have brought more than fifty pitanga plants to the greenhouse and likely have more than two hundred total plants over there. What I wonder is how to find homes for these plants grown from the seed of the pitanga and the guava I have grown. 

The ground outside is crunchy. I can’t remember the last time it rained. Here and there a quick breeze comes in through the kitchen windows. I feed what is left of the rice to the chickens and consider the vision of this back window. 

We could have a longer view. We could see all the way to the fence. We could cut the moringa in the next month or so. I almost said in the next couple of weeks but then thought that would be too soon, and rather than admit that, caught myself acting as if I had to know. 

This need to know or look as though I know could be one of the precursors to war. Somebody unwilling to admit that he could be wrong. Somebody unwilling to look weak in the moment when that might actually offer strength later.

What I have learned about moringa is that they are like most plants that come back year after year, in that they grow best when there are a number of seeds spread and then these seeds and the whims of this New Orleans weather determine which grow and which don’t.

From this point there is much that can be done, for like any perennial, they often pick up speed in their second year. When I knew less I might have considered the moringa dead come winter, but if marked and paid attention to, they will come back with vigor in the spring. They are able to thrive in poor soil.

Once woody, the branches can be cut and stuck into the ground so that one might have an entire perimeter of moringa, reaching deep, mining nutrients, providing shade in the spring, and offering nutrients to you and me through their leaves.

I want to be prepared for a world without rain. I want to be prepared for a monsoon. I want to grow old with strength and without hospitals and with the realization that what I put into my body is the same as what we put into the soil, that there exists the same sort of relationships between all that lives, that the trees are the lungs of the earth and my house is surrounded, and now is the time for me to consider how this space will become cooler and cooler.

It’s a strange sort of affair, the way heat makes me crave cool, but not too cool because then cold causes the craving for heat and this can be so prevalent that some can only exist between seventy and seventy two degrees no matter the time of year. 

So the question becomes how to exist within what each of us define as extreme.