Natural Law

Another online sneak preview! Next week’s Horse Fly will be running the following column by yours truly. It’s entitled “Natural Law” and goes like this:

I did not used to have these experiences.

My landlord was recently ill and required major surgery. A caring neighbor and fellow tenant who visited him in the hospital first brought back word from his doctor, and then from a medicine man. Tell someone that most places and the conversation stumbles — maybe not completely though, if people ask and you’re allowed to answer questions. I had one myself and asked, “Which medicine man?” (Just asking puts you in a different place.) When I found out he was someone I actually knew, it was like I’d gotten a tattoo somewhere along the line.

Three summers ago a bear decided to eat my plums by sitting in the tree. Afterwards it was in worse shape than my landlord, but I bound it up with rope and duct tape and watered for two years. This August the tree held so many plums, I thought it would shatter of its own accord. All this in the same season the grasshoppers ate everything else in sight.

We planted lots of grasshopper food this year, all glowing, green examples of the prettiest things you’d ever want to gaze on in a garden. Almost everything is gone now, save for immortal geraniums in big clay pots. The other flowers vanished petals-first, then leaves and stalks. They ate the peppers, they ate the squash. I brought in a ringer, a special herb renowned for chasing insects — if you have to ask how long it lasted, you aren’t driving me to Wal-Mart. (I know it’s close, but still.) The grasshoppers even got my corn. I don’t mean they ate the ears, I mean they felled the stalks, one by one, by gnawing through the base. It was like Republicans with chainsaws in a national park: they weren’t just hungry, but on a mission.

Meanwhile, the hair keeps falling from my head. My wife might argue it falls out because it’s long, ha-ha. All I know is that the cat no longer sheds the most, and that feels very weird. As a benefit of sorts, I can see my forehead now, and farther back along the sides. The shape of my skull is interesting, handsome even, and I like the way the light glints off my temples. Too bad the sun is going down, the sea is coming up. I wish this were reversed, but some things probably have to be experienced.

The other night I was pondering this from the safety of the sofa when I looked up at my computer. The built-in screensaver was running through selected photos from our first years in el Norte, a long slideshow from the rumble-tumble past. I saw the bumper from what could have been a ‘57 Chevy serving as a fencepost in a mountain village. Lobo Peak gleamed pink and purple in the sunset. Canyons opened up and disappeared. Scenes of unspeakable beauty and sheer madness rolled by side-by-side, fading in and fading out. Gradually it dawned on me that I’d accomplished something just by breathing, and that if I dropped dead in the morning, all anyone had to do was boot up the old Mac and marvel.

This afternoon another neighbor told me of a time she heard a voice inside her head and built a house. She and her partner had just moved in, with plastic stapled where there would be windows, when one night a fearsome blizzard tried to blow the building down. The fellow decided he’d had enough and trudged next-door to seek shelter with a friend who always stayed up late. (My landlord, if you have to know.) My neighbor would have none of this and burrowed deeper in the covers while the snow piled up. Later she heard noises, shouting maybe, through the roaring wind: outside was her lover, staggering through the drifts to get back home. She climbed down the ladder from the loft and hurried out to haul him in. Safely back inside, the question of the moment was just what my future landlord had been doing behind adobe walls at 2:00 a.m., while the storm was raging all around:

“Just sitting there, staring at his shoes…”

(Hell, if I can do this, anyone can.)

Share this post ↓

No related posts.