4. Emma
Emma
Emma’s heart lifted as she walked out into yet another blue-sky day. The sun was gentle enough in February that she could lift her face to it instead of hiding under a hat. The weather was glorious, and she couldn’t bear staying inside a moment longer than she had to.
In the dappled sunlight of the front lawn, her little jaboticaba tree was pushing out fresh leaves.
Keith had saved the sapling from certain death by splicing it back together with an expertise cultivated through grafting countless thousands of fruit trees.
The little tree had healed, and now it was growing again: a testament to just how resilient life could be.
She wandered around the side of the house in search of Kai, her bare feet padding along the cool green lawn. A few of the chickens followed her, hoping that she might toss out a papaya or watermelon rind for them to peck at.
She found Kai halfway up a tree, leaning against the trunk and paging through a comic book that Piper had given him. His bare feet swung lazily in the air, the picture of a childhood summer – and in midwinter, no less.
“I’m going to walk over to the community garden,” she told him. “Do you want to come?”
“Nah,” he said without looking up. “I’ll stay here with Jun.”
Emma looked up to the lanai, where Juniper sat with her feet propped up and a glass of iced tea in her hand.
“That’s fine,” Jun said. “I’m a beached whale. I’m not going anywhere.”
“Except the bathroom,” Kai teased.
“Every ten minutes,” Jun confirmed wryly.
“It’s ‘cause you drink so much tea!”
“No, it’s because your little cousin is sitting on my bladder!”
Kai laughed and went back to his book.
“I won’t be gone long,” Emma said, walking towards the lanai. “Do you need anything from town?”
“Bittermelon?”
Emma wrinkled her nose. “Really?”
“Pregnancy cravings are weird,” Jun said with a shrug. “You know that produce stand around the corner? They should have some.”
“Okay, I’ll pick some up on my way home.”
“You’re the best.”
“I know.” Emma winked at her niece and went inside to grab a pair of shoes.
“And grapefruit!” Jun called through the open window.
“Okay!”
“Thank you!” she sang.
Emma tucked a pair of garden gloves and her favorite shears into her pockets and set out towards town.
Walking down the road, she cherished the soundscape of Pualena: the sea breeze rustling leaves high overhead, the distant barking of dogs, the abundance of birdsong. It wasn’t so different from her childhood home in the redwoods, really.
It looked different, of course. Back there, the world was reddish brown dotted with bits of color.
In Hawai‘i, the world was painted with a liberal hand.
Vibrant greenery was everywhere, splashed with great splotches of red and orange and yellow.
And the smell was different: damp earth and tropical flowers instead of the dry spice of fallen pine needles.
But the deep peace that came from being surrounded by live growing things… that was the same.
The community garden was filled with green growing things as well… unfortunately, most of them hadn’t been deliberately planted there. Stubborn grasses peeked up out of the sides of the garden beds, and a whole host of wind-blown seeds had taken root.
Emma weeded her garden nearly every day to keep ahead of the many unwelcome plants that tried to take up residence in the rich soil of her beds.
The community garden, on the other hand, was out of sight and out of mind.
If she let a week or two slip by without visiting, the weeds started to outpace everything else – and despite the schedule she had drawn up, the other volunteers didn’t seem to be showing up on their days.
Other people in the community did occasionally show up and plant things, which made it exponentially more difficult for Emma to differentiate between opportunistic weeds and young plants that people were growing deliberately.
She had learned a lot in the past year or so, but differentiating between vegetables and weeds at a glance when they were only a few inches tall… that was still beyond her.
To weed or not to weed? she texted Keith, attaching a picture of some seedlings she didn’t recognize.
That is the question , he shot back.
Unhelpful .
That garden needs more mulch.
When’s the last time you tried to get a truckload of that stuff? It’s like gold dust over here! There’s a waiting list six months long!
She had resorted to buying bags of mulch at the store to use in her own garden beds, but they were silly expensive. Covering the neglected community garden with pricy mulch felt like an exercise in futility… but then, so did her weekly weeding efforts as the jungle began to creep back in.
“Maybe big community work days every couple of weeks would be more realistic than scheduling volunteers,” she mused aloud.
The moment she realized that she was talking to herself, she wrinkled her nose and knelt down to work. Too much time with plants. Getting other people into the garden would probably be a good idea.
Since she was still unsure which of the little plants in the beds were weeds, she set about pulling up the stubborn grass that had grown in around the young pineapple plants.
She had planted the tops of dozens of pineapples with the playschool kids and had a nice crop growing at the back of the garden…
but the grass kept trying to grow over them.
The perennial peanut she had learned about in her permaculture classes was supposed to cover the ground between plants so that weeds couldn’t take root, but so far her ground cover seemed to be fighting a losing battle against the grass that had been thriving there for years.
As often happened when she was gardening, time melted away. She drifted into a state of perfect zen, pulling up bits of grass and listening to the birds chat back and forth.
“You’re in your element.”
Emma jumped in surprise.
Keith’s laughter rolled out low and pleasant as he raised his hands in apology.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to startle you.”
“What are you doing here?”
“You had a mulch problem?” He gestured to his truck, parked as close as he could get it without driving up over the curb. “I brought mulch.”
“You what?” She rose to her feet and stared across the lawn.
His truck bed was piled with clippings of all of the nitrogen-fixing plants that they grew for mulch at the Pualena Permaculture demonstration farm. Most of it was tithonia, dotted all over with bright yellow Mexican sunflowers.
“You brought me a whole truckload of flowers,” she breathed.
“Yeah.” His expression softened when she met his eyes. “I guess I did.”
She stood frozen for a moment. The blue of his eyes was brighter than the sky.
“Is there a wheelbarrow hereabouts?” he asked.
“Yeah,” she answered, snapping out of her daze. “There’s one in the shed. I’ll unlock it.”
Keith brought the green mulch across the lawn one wheelbarrow-full at a time while Emma distributed it around the garden, tucking it in around the young pineapples and recently transplanted tomatoes.
“It’s not enough to cover every bed,” he said as he dumped the last load, “but it’s a start.”
“This is amazing. Thank you.”
“What else needs doing?” He seemed to be asking himself more than her, eyes scanning the space as he spoke.
“I’ve got my weed eater in the truck. I can cut back that cactus grass that’s creeping in at the northern edge of the garden.
Maybe next time we should plant a line of lemongrass there. It makes a great barrier.”
Something in Emma’s chest warmed at the words ‘next time’. Before she could think of a response, he was halfway back to the shed with the empty wheelbarrow.
As they worked at opposite ends of the garden, her attention kept drifting his way.
At first, she blamed it on the noisy weed whacker breaking her peace. But she found herself looking at his shaggy sun-blond hair or the muscles of his arms as he cut back the grass… and as she caught herself watching him, she began to wonder if she was in trouble.
Her friendship with Keith had become a steady, reliable part of her life in Pualena… but it seemed to be tipping towards something more.