NOTE: If you haven’t been following this from the beginning, and if you want to know the full sequence of events, start with the introduction. Click on Archives on the right.
Three leafless stems with a few thin branches rise from a large red clay pot on the patio behind Diddlie’s carport, surrounded by a cage improvised out of chicken wire. It is draped with oak catkins dangling like tinsel and yellow with white-oak pollen. Diddlie watches Mr. Liddell feeding on the fresh spring chickweed growing between the patio pavers. Preoccupied by the recent death of her English cousin Ian, she has gone quiet. A blue jay shrieks.
“Were you close?”
“No, we weren’t that close lately, but we have a history.”
“Ahh, I see.”
“Fred, you don’t see anything!”
“I only see what you mean.”
She is looking past me into the trees.
“Well, just don’t use that know-it-all tone of yours, okay.”
Her phone chimes but she ignores it.
“Might I ask about your history?”
“You can ask, sure!”
“Is that what makes his death so painful?”
“Well, what do you think?”
“I didn’t want to be presumptuous!”
“It is just a private thing okay?”
“Oh certainly … would you rather I came back some other time?”
“No, Fred … I mean … I mean I want to talk, but not about that….
Her phone chimes and she looks down at it, and puts it back in her jeans pocket.
“…well anyway. I had to put that wire around my apple trees to keep birds and squirrels out, or something. I lost a whole year’s crop when I came out one afternoon and found the dirt all spread out everywhere and the seedlings gone.”
Diddlie steps over to pick up Mr. Liddell who has wandered over to the cilantro and parsley sprouting above deep blue and emerald green glazed earthen ware. He ignores the thyme growing on the border of the flower bed which he reaches first. He scrambles away from her. Last night’s storm knocked so many blooms off the pink azaleas in the bed beyond the thyme, Mr. Liddell runs into a pink paradise under the arch of overhanging branches weighted with rain-soaked petals.
Diddlie, pauses in front of the azaleas and looks back at the big pot.
“Those apple trees were two years old but didn’t make it through winter.”
“Give them time, perhaps they will sprout yet.”
Diddlie, walks over and reaches down to a thin twig sticking through the wire mesh and snaps it off.
“Not much green in there.”
“Did you grow them from seed?’
“Yes, I put two others in the ground over by the property line, and they survived.”
“Any fruit yet?”
“No, they won’t fruit for at least five years and probably won’t be edible anyway.
“So, it’s a gamble.”
“Yes, nature is holding all the cards.”
Her phone chimes again and she seems to be
reading a short text. She puts it back in her pocket.
“What kind of seed did you plant?”
“These were probably Goldrush and York. I don’t remember really. I just kept putting seeds in an old salt cellar on the sideboard every time I ate an apple.”
“I find they tend to fly around when you cut an apple in half.”
“Not if you do it carefully and put your hand over it. You know every seed grows into a new thing.”
“A new type?”
“Yes, another kind of apple.”
“So, you can’t expect more Yorks or Gold Rush.”
“My old aunt, Maria Gostrey used to grow Cox’s and James Grieve in her garden in Chester. Ian and I used to pick up windfalls.”
“Wind falls?’
“Yes, wind falls, that’s what they called fruit that dropped before it was ripe.”
“Oh! the ones with bugs in them!”
“Supposedly the sweetest! Pecked open by birds, or whatever … “
“They also harbor wasps attracted by all that apple scent.”
“Ian was often gloomy and would say he felt he would fall into the, ‘Great vacuum of doom’.
“Sounds rather frightening!”
“Well, he was matter of fact about it actually.”
“It seems to have left an impression on you though.”
“Anyway Fred, I don’t want to talk about it.”
Mr. Liddell has emerged from his bower. He raises an ear, the other is caught in the azalea thicket. Diddlie moves quickly enough to catch him this time. His pink nose pulsates as he tries to wriggle in her arms.
“I better take him in.”
Rain has started again, and she pulls her floral Indian wrap up over her head as I follow through the carport to Mr. Liddell’s hutch near the front. Her phone chimes again as she puts Mr. Liddell in his hutch head first, smoothing his ears down, and closing the hatch. She looks at the phone, puts it away and runs out to the front driveway. Daisy Briscoe is standing by the front door with a bunch of daffodils set off by fern and sprays of spirea and forsythia. We walk over.
“Hi Did., Fred, no one answered when I rang the bell.”
“No, we were out back yacking.”
“Sorry about your cousin Diddlie.”
Diddlie doesn’t take the flowers at once. She taps her phone. Daisey keeps hold of them resting the stems on her shoulder. The blooms spread their colors behind her, out of Diddlie’s sight.
“How did you know?”
“Oh, from Lou.”
“I never told him.”
“Well, he said he sent you some electrons.”
“Yeah, right, he hasn’t stopped texting all day, him and all kinds of people. I mean how did they all find out?”
“Does it matter?”
“Yeah, it matters Fred. I know who I tell what. You know what I mean?”
“Sure, but you can get mixed up too.”
“No, to me, each person is a story of their own.”
“They are? What do you mean?”
“I mean, I know each story. Each one is its own thing. I know who I told what, and where they are in my life. I didn’t tell any of these people. I know what I told Lark and I know what I told you, Fred, and there’s stuff I haven’t ever told anyone … and there’s lies I got burned by too.”
“Well, it is a bad habit.”
“Who doesn’t fall into lies from time to time, Daisy?”
“I couldn’t say.”
Diddlie looks away from Daisy down at the concrete step.
“This is my private business.”
Her phone chimes sound.
“It’s these damn things. Spreading twaddle through twitter … and constantly interrupting.”
“Turn it off Did.!”
“You know I should, Fred but I am expecting something important, so I am stuck with it. We are all stuck with it, here, at least.”
Daisy’s chimes sound. She wanders out into the rain with the phone up to her ear and circles back and hands Diddlie her phone.
“It’s wet Daisy, I’ll get electrocuted!”
“Oh Diddlie! She wipes it on the underside of her long sleeve and smears the screen.
“Give it to me!”
Diddlie takes an oil stained towel out of her cupboard and dries the phone off on a selected patch of faded yellow and puts it to her ear.
“There’s no one there.”
“Must have hung it up when we dried it off.”
“Who was it?”
“Bel Vionnet, she’s got kittens to give away. I thought you might like one.”
“Does she know too? I mean did Lark put this in Face book or something? Besides, I have a bird and a rabbit. No way a cat is coming here!”
Diasy walks toward the carport with me and Diddlie while she is busy with her phone again.
“I don’t do Facebook. Do you Fred?”
“Yes sometimes. I haven’t seen anything about Ian, though.”
We all shelter in the carport as light rain falls through sunshine. Diddlie has her hand up around the back of her neck.
“Well, I don’t do it either. I bailed out after all that about the way our data is used or sold, I should say.”
Mr. Liddell is scratching about in his hutch. Daisy has backed up so close to the hutch that Mr. Liddell is trying to get a nibble of fern.
“Daisy, mind the rabbit!”
Daisy steps forward holding the flowers upright and away from the hutch.
“I mean it is kind of amazing when I think of it. How all the people I know stay in their place, until this happens and they kind of all spill out.”
Daisy changes hands, holding her flowers down with the stems up.
“From your yard, Daisy … for me?”
She hands Diddlie the flowers, who holds
the bunch in both hands rotating it to see the full selection and arrangement.
“Well, I hope he didn’t fall into the vacuum of doom.”
She puts the flowers down on top of a tall box.
“God! I hope nobody does!”
“Well, no one knows what happens after our death.”
“There’s plenty of people will tell you they do you know, Fred.”
Diddley is rummaging in her cupboard, and finds a painter’s bucket to put the flowers in. She then puts flowers and bucket out in the rain where the dried lavender and orange paint drips look wet again, running down the sides.
“There, that will keep them going.”
“Yeah! Look at the rain drops on the spirea. The sun is doing interesting things. See that!”
“Ah, maybe, I am not a painter, Daisy.”
“Just look Fred. Forget paint, check those translucent drops.”
Diddlie has pulled her wrap tight around her chest, as she watches the rain.
“But it’s not just death. The scary thing is that the vacuum is right here. I mean I can feel it.”
“You mean we are the vacuum, or is it in you?”
“No, no, it’s like Ian said, he is afraid of falling out of life into nothing, nothing but a big pile of purchases, unread books and cloths he never wore, just stuff.”
He had more stuff when we were kids than any one I knew. He went on buying all his life. Deliveries came every day. Then he threw it all out. Didn’t even give it away. Just threw it out. That was an email I got from him … a couple of weeks ago … after years … after years of just Christmas cards.
