Juanita

“Make sure you put me in that book,” Juanita says, smiling wide, standing a little straighter than she usually stands.

She walks away from my truck with the twenty I gave her clenched in her fist. I hope she doesn’t get a bad batch laced with fentanyl. She doesn’t look like a Juanita, but that said, I've only ever met two, one of Italian descent and the other Mexican.

This Juanita is from the 9th Ward, born and raised, and I see her nearly everyday in front of the corner store on Needle Street. She wasn’t always bent over so far. A couple of years ago she came by the garden and told me how it hadn’t always been this way. She said she started about ten years ago. She said she raised kids, got them into college.

I didn’t ask how she got started. I didn’t ask if it was casual at first. I don’t know many casual heroin users. I did believe her. 

Everybody starts somewhere. Everybody has a hungry ghost inside and sometimes that hungry ghost lies in wait. 

I don’t often give money around Needle Street. I let everything unfold without my interference. I’ve found a gun in a wood chip pile over there, a box of needles in a bed of Tabasco peppers. I often pick up trash along the sidewalk. What I need to remember is that corner store was there long before I moved into the neighborhood.

Sometimes I meet people and forget their name moments after an introduction. I am a visual person and so I try to form an image to remember. I could have imagined this Juanita standing between the other two I know, and I would have remembered.

There is part of me that thinks she might have had a different name when I first met her. So many on Needle Street have so many different names.

Yesterday I asked how to spell her name because I couldn't remember her name. That’s another little trick I learned that is always embarrassing when somebody says something like Joe or Mike. I don’t know many spellings for Juanita, and my hope is that she thought I knew none.

I had asked her permission to write about her in my blog. She said, of course. 

Here’s the story I want to tell, how I came home from a weekend to find twenty trowels on my front porch. People know I like to dig. The only evidence of their source was a green bag from Crescent Care on Elysian Fields.

Juanita flagged me down. Something she doesn’t usually do. 

She said, “You got those little shovels I left on your porch?”

It was almost the end of the month which meant there wasn’t as much money coming in and I’m sure that Juanita could have gotten ten bucks or more for all of those shovels. 

I never asked where they came from. She didn’t ask me where they would go. She gave like the story of the poor widow in the Gospel of Luke.

It really meant something that she would think of me. Maybe she knows the way that I try to think of others, how I have not once condemned any of what happens on that street. Because I understand. I know that everyone carries a burden that I’m not aware of. I know that everyone is trying their best.

Late this morning, I popped two kinds of cassia, black locust, and tithonia into the ground on the corner of Pauline just before the downpour. A woman passed with a couple lengths of rooted purple flowers in her hands. She asked what I was doing.

Turns out we knew each other. She had taken a broken blue pot from my stoop. I had given this to her.

“Before the fire,” Shannon reminded me. “I had glued it all back together, too.”

She told me that the cuttings she carried would root from the stem. Bright purple balls of flowers that I had never grown before. 

In the rain, I popped the cutting into a space, got into my truck, and then a name came from nowhere.

Gomphrena.

From then until this moment, I have no idea how that name got into my head, but sure enough, this was the name of the flower according to google.

And if a word like gomphrena exists somewhere in the recesses of the connections inside my head I have to wonder at how much more is in there.