Holy Shit, a Raccoon

Brown Turkey fig

I drive down Irk Street and think that I could be the middleman between restaurants and kids who could pick all the figs the birds do not get. I’m told go ahead and pass. You don’t have to back up just before I see the same kid I saw the other day, some kind of AK-47 or big gun I don’t know stuffed into his pants. 

The 9th Ward is a strange place to grow. About two months ago I lay clay pavers to make a border between sidewalk and street at the school garden. Come this morning to find most of them stolen.

I put task on task and struggle to finish. I feel this is all neverending. And it is. 

I did stand atop the wood chip pile on Needle Street this morning and think that maybe T could be my right hand man even though he’s only fifteen. That even though no money is coming in I could pay him ten bucks an hour cash. I could show him that there could be money in this if we had enough people.

It’s hard to explain the heat of New Orleans summer. It’s hard to explain that it’s best just to let everything grow wild.

It’s hard to explain my need to find something new, to somehow be different, but this is inside of me. What else is inside of me is the need and desire to collaborate, to take what I know and share this, to believe that somebody else’s success does not mean my failure.

This morning I traded water lettuce for two guppies.

“One of them’s pregnant,” my neighbor said.

I asked if it could go in the aquarium outside. He said it’s not the heat that gets them, but the need for oxygen. So perhaps I’ll put some of my own water lettuce on the surface.

So much more is possible. More ponds and more rain collection and more fish. And I wonder if the ducks would eat the fish or if they would be satisfied with bugs.

Did you know that dragonflies will hover on the high branches of the figs and eat the fruit flies that come by after birds peck holes in the fruit? And did you know that to beat the birds I must wake before dawn. I’m wondering if foil wrapped around some of the almost ripe brown turkey figs might deter the birds. I wonder if I piss in a spray bottle and hit the branches with this if that would help, the same way people sometimes spray coyote piss in their attics to deter squirrels.

It’s hard to stick to a project, to stay with the plan at the school garden, for a different neighbor, before the guppies came, asked, do I still want the branches that somebody left in front of his house in a shopping cart. 

I tell him I’m trying to stick to a plan.

“Is that the moringa,” he asks.

“That’s black locust. This is moringa.”

“Can you eat black locust?”

I said, “You can, but I’m not going to. It’s good for fixing nitrogen, for chopping and dropping around other trees. How’s the moringa I planted in your yard?”

“It’s doing good.”

I ended up cutting him some black locust and showing him how to pop these cuttings into the ground. Then I thought I might as well do the same with tithonia. Knowing that’s the way loss of focus begins, I got back to my truck and headed to the school.

I wonder what that kid does with his big gun. I wonder what it might look like to work with T. I wonder if I’ll run out of money. I wonder, if I trust, if I know that what I’m doing is good, that I will be taken care of, and T will be taken care of and the kid with the AK-47 will, well, maybe he will be taken care of, too.

I passed a young man on Elysian Fields, track marks covering his arms. He held a sign asking for money. I considered inviting him to start some seeds for ten dollars, less for the help I need, and more for him. He said his name was Eddie, but I didn't think to ask him about planting until after I left. 

The birds sure are flap happy up in that fig tree. I watch from my window, right here, right now, and HOLY SHIT, a raccoon, on a branch, bending the entire thing, and I just came for starlings and skip tailed flat tailed something or other birds. Who would have thought I’d get a whole vision of a raccoon, and I consider more and enough and just what tomorrow might bring and whether T will show up on time, and then I think, when I was 15, I put a frog in a girl’s thermos and got fired from a detasseling job, so who am I to judge?