Spreading or Stealing

Sunset outside my window

Stealing or spreading? This is the question I ask. 

Something is different. I know this pulling up at the school garden. A moringa and zinnia I started from seed have been dug out of the ground. This is not the first time. Papaya trees went missing. There used to be a guy around my house who pulled all three of the kumquat trees I planted for Mr. B and the one by the stop sign at solo fresh out of the ground.

I like to think that this moringa will grow taller than the house where it is planted. I like to think that pods will fill with seeds and whoever took the tree will share these seeds with his neighbor. I don’t know why I just now thought it must be a him. I like to believe there is enough for everybody. I remember trying to give away fruit trees years ago and how some folks were worried that if they planted a tree somebody might steal the fruit. The way I look at this is the inside and outside of the fence and how people passing by might take only what they can eat while standing.

There is a nine year old persimmon tree in my front yard. I have had iron gates that took four men to carry dragged from my unfenced yard in the middle of the night. I have lost ten or more bicycles. I have left my shed open and been relieved of all of my worldly goods. And what are they but worldly goods? What is the next step once something goes missing?

Why do I hold so tight to what I think is mine? Why do I think that forever exists? Maybe Love? Maybe the fear of death?

In the 9th Ward, your best bet is to somehow conceal a seedling. Don’t plant a tree too big. Let the seedling take root and dig deep so that no matter how hard somebody pulls the resistance makes them give up.

I grow to foster life, to bring in more bugs and more birds and more love, and I don’t know exactly how to reconcile that with somebody’s taste for the aesthetic. 

Tell me what the aesthetic is in baby hen’s pecking to death the weakest of their group? What is the aesthetic in a dragonfly eating a bee? What is the aesthetic in the way grass grows to bush to tree to vines and grows and grows until there is no more grass, only forest floor.

And what is it about the six minutes? The way T called at 9:06 asking if I still wanted him to work even though I said nine the night before. I told him we’d try again Monday. For nine. Cause people don’t say at nine.

The man at Chalmette bicycle and lawn mower repair told me they couldn’t take back my mower. Said I shouldn't be cutting such tall grass. Said, when I said how I cut entire fields knee high when I was ten years old told me that that was back when they made lawn mowers to cut.

So…I wonder about the future, about gasoline, about the cayratia Japonica that PJ spent the day pulling, about how I gave him sixty bucks, about how then his mom said she wanted to buy a fig tree for fifty, about how money is a boomerang.

And sometimes I think that I know best. And sometimes I catch myself before professing this. And sometimes the sunset hits so perfect outside my window that it doesn’t even matter what I write.