Right on Time

When I leave right on time, Adrian honks at me from behind. He lives on the corner right near what used to be Mystery Garden, but I knew him before that. He pulls up beside me on Poland. 

“Let me get one of those trees.”

“Which one?”

“Like the one those people took from you.”

“I got you.”

He tells me he’s going by the house, so I follow. It’s sad for me to pull up to what maybe only I can see, for these are not only plants but relationships, the bright yellow flowers of swamp mallow were not bought from a nursery weeks before, but started from seed a couple years ago. This is their second year. And there is moringa that has died and come back again. Long beans snake through a lemon tree I have watched to heal. 

I pull a little further than I normally would, dig up a hunk of galangal beside the rain barrels. I try to think where all that I have planted might go. I try to think of the order, of what is most important. It’s like a parent trying to decide just what to do with conjoined twins, and maybe this is something only understood by one who has done it.

Adrian tells me he wants one of those pom uh things. I tell him that I don’t have pomegranate there, that I think he means papaya. 

We dig a hole into a pile of soil on the East facing side of his brick house. I do not say that South or West would be better. I do not say that the three bags of red mulch are not good for the earth or that he is always welcome to take from the pile that the tree trimmers dropped across the street. I have probably already said both of these things and nobody ever likes to be told twice, and me, well…I can sometimes tell people three or ten times.

I dig, and he digs. I tell him that if we get a tough winter that the papaya may die back, that he can cut this at an angle, three feet high after that and the tree should come back from the roots.

“You have to wait until they get pink?” he asks.

“You can eat them green, peel the skin, use the white inside like you might use cabbage to make coleslaw. 

“I told my sister how they did you over there.”

I see what must be his sister on the porch in a shirt airbrushed and honoring the life of somebody who has passed. She’s older than both of us. We smile at each other.

“We got three hundred signatures,” Adrian says. “Trying to get that lady out of there.”

I think about him saying this, about what could have been. 

“These ones probably turn orange. They’re better ripe.”

“Daddy’s going to eat good,” he says to his sister. 

I think the only thing that could be is the thing that is. I think about how to imagine everything I could ever want, how to consider how I might feel were I to get this, and then to live as if I already have this life.

And so I consider a world where I continue to learn, where my learning brings in money. I consider a world where I create and my creations support me. And I envision holding hands with Nasim in the middle of the day, walking through the streets and picking fruit together, learning what it means to love. 

I consider how most days I don’t know that I am right on time until I get there.