Mrs. Scurfield came by early this morning. Woke me up. I stood scratching my head in the doorway, waiting for an explanation.
“This,“ she said with a smile, “is for you.” I became aware of a small red pot in her hands. Full of dirt. “It’s a Crooked Tree seedling,” she whispered, and handed it to me.
I raised my eyes to meet hers.
“You can do whatever you want with it,” she said. “Pave it over. It’s all yours.”
I was astounded. The unexpected weight of the soil pulled on my arms.
“But,” she continued in decreased volume, “I have a favour to ask.”
I smiled.
“I want you to join the Friends of the Crooked Bush.”
I was looking again at the red clay pot. I coughed.
“We’re meeting on Friday at 8pm at the Trees,” she said matter-of-factly. I began forming a response, but before I could begin to answer she turned and walked away.
I felt like shit all day. I tried smoking a cigarette but stopped half way through.
My kitchen table is covered in pages of photocopied essays. I look without reading. Now that I have time off again, my obsession returns.
4 comments:
Are those bullet holes in the sign?
SO glad that the reunion is over.
And maybe those essays will tell you how to grow a "straight" (reformed? redeemed?) tree and then you can breed your own sub-population. But can mutations (if that's what they are) spawn what we conceive of as normal?
..just sayin'...
I can't figure out what those marks are. Something obvious, I'm sure, but I don't know what.
I don't know how to respond to the reformed/redeemed/straight stuff.
Do you think maybe my dislike of the Trees is simply that they're not normal? I don't think that's it, but I never thought of it quite like that before.
No Matthew, I would never think that your dislike (putting it lightly) of the trees is "simply that they're not normal." I was mostly being facetious I guess-just trying to think of creative things to do with your new and intriguing tremuloides. So no, even if you were able to generate your own sub-culture, I don't think that would fix anything.
I really didn't like the "redeem" idea... unless you are a person of a narrow mind. It is nature... there is a vague outline of what the norm of majority is.
To look at something as a "norm" can all look the same - but to look at each individual in a "norm" are all very different. And we can only see what is on the surface, but what does that count for?
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