peach tree switch

the saturday farm market is at grand army plaza. it is large and overwhelming and full of stroller-pushing maniacs with an undue sense of entitlement. they will run you down with a thousand dollar stroller designed to roll smoothly over the body of any victim the parent flattens with it. my desire to get green things overwhelms my stroller hatred so i take the dog. he carries his eel and the world collapses into wide eyes and cooing noises around him. he is my weapon, keeping these otherwise snooty folks weak and malleable with his terrible cuteness, allowing me to meander among tables full of bedding plants and cheese and cider.

i buy bacon from a stand where pigs with wings fly overhead. from childhood i've known that buying food animals from small farms generally means tastier food. my bacon is made out of old breed pigs. rare and quirky like heirloom tomatoes. if i want to go stay at the farm sometime, there's a little apartment in an old barn right there. if i want to drop by some time just to see a pig or two, the farmers encourage that as well. the pigs, they say, love company. i like an animal that is tasty and gregarious.

there is cheese from flop-eared nubian goats. a log with lavender flowers and honey rolled up in the soft cheese. a tub with orange, honey and walnuts stirred around. the dog stands rigid with his eel while i give the woman money and take the cheese. other dogs try to visit with him but he doesn't even see them. there is only the eel. we have our focus, each of us.

i head over to a table full of lavender. pillows and sachets and little dried bundles. a long line of plants of all sizes is over to the side. i ask for a plant and the man wants to know if i need indoor or outdoor. i have never heard of such a thing and i ask. this seems fair to me but he takes offense somehow and in a condescending tone explains that plants grown outside will die if they are kept inside and vice versa. i know this is not true because i've owned lavender plants in the past that have wintered indoors and then spent the glorious summer days basking on the porch or fire escape. i ask another question about a plant in a south facing window (even though i don't have one) and the man's voice gets so tense i decide to ignore his stupidity. i get an indoor plant and an outdoor plant. all bases covered.

we are leaving when i notice peach tree switches. now, the sign says "peach blossom" but what they are is four foot long switches with buds. now, if you are of a certain age and from a certain part of the country, your biggest childhood fear was a peach tree switch. my own parents preferred the psychological warfare: go to your room! you better not even try reading a book while you're in there! so although i have absolutely no recollection of this sort of punishment on my own tender backside i can tell you grown folks made it clear that the horribleness of it was not always so much in the switching, but more in the fact that you had to go out and cut your own switch from the tree. this would give you time to think about your sorry state and it would be clear to you that no matter how clever you thought you might be in your selection of switches, the red welts on the backs of your legs were there because you had brought the miserable branch into the house yourself. peach tree switches were, during my childhood, the punishment of choice of grannies, especially. it takes very little arm strength to deal a stinging blow and you can continue to yell at the child while switching.

they are eight dollars for a bundle of twelve switches and there's really no reason not to get them. i hand over my eight dollars and try to balance the dog, his eel, the bacon, two cheeses, the indoor lavender plant, the outdoor lavender plant and the bundle of switches. there are several attempts at rearranging on the way home and finally i carry the branches over my shoulder, hobo style. we get home and the bacon and cheeses go right in the fridge. the plants go on the windowsill and the fire escape. i have no idea what to do with these switches, though. they are too big for any vase i have ever owned. they are too big for any container we have in this tiny apartment. there is a very distinct possibility that they are too big for this apartment.

they lie in the sink all afternoon, bottom ends submerged in water, bundled tight with two bands of twine. i search the kitchen store, the flea market, the garden store and a few thrift stores. i walk all the way down to the big home improvement store by the canal. i walk six or seven miles just trying to find a container for four foot tall switches. i have given up and flopped myself on the couch when i see the ice cream maker sitting quietly by the bookcase. actually it is the wooden outer bucket of the ice cream maker we used when i was a child. dad would drape a towel over the top and would have one of us sit on it to weigh it down when cranking the handle got to be so difficult the whole bucket would roll around.

it is a little over a foot tall and not quite a foot across and it is made out of vertical staves banded by rusted metal rings, barrelish. the bottom ring is gone but there's a bit of the silvery paper label smack in the middle of the thing. i put a dish of water in the bottom and drop the bundle into the bucket. the whole thing leans to one side and nearly flips over. i hold the bundle up in the center and snip the top band of twine. it is like a flower opening up. the branches ease apart from one another scattering pink buds on the floor. i snip the second band of twine and the whole mass breathes out, relaxes. a cotton candy tree stands in the apartment, worth all eight of those dollars and then some.

fig

apartment saturday. brooklyn saturday. the sweetie has to work today but we are close enough to the rest of the world we can walk to our favorite diner before he leaves by going one block down and one block over. it is early and the booths are mostly empty. our waitress has not seen us since labor day and asks about the house, the yard. she is a gardener. the diner always has little pots of freshly rooting plants- avocado trees and figs. her handiwork. we visit a bit and then eat. as we get ready to leave, she brings us a tiny tree, maybe a foot or so tall, with four soft green teddybearish leaves on it. the rest of the plant is twiggy, barky, with small roots snaking off near the top of the soil. she offers us the tree, which turns out to be a fig, with the hope we have a place to plant it upstate.

now, i know the sweetie and i know me. we love to garden but our recent attempts to understand the rocky, acidic, shady and often frozen upstate land we own have not been what you'd call consistently good. but there is a fig tree on our table sitting right next to a fork and my teacup and already i love it so much i can't even think straight. i will raise it in the apartment, in the pot, where it will be safe. i tell our waitress about walking home from school through bensonhurst neighborhoods thick with fig trees, wanting to sneak away with a fig or with a cutting. but most trees don't just root from cuttings like violets do and i imagined horrifying beauty and the beastish scenes where some crazed bensonhurst fig tree owner would come barreling out of his house to capture me and how guthrie would somehow end up taking my place, watching me suffer at home through the lens of a magic crystal ball. and i could never quite get up the nerve. she hears my plan and laughs because that's exactly where my little fig came from. she snipped a cutting from a tree while walking through bensonhurst and rooted the thing.

after breakfast the sweetie heads off toward the train and manhattan and work. i walk through not quite awake streets, past gated stores with my fig tree clutched against my chest, its leaves fluttering against my cheek. later today guthrie and i will go to the garden store and get some soil and a new clay pot for the tree but for now, i'm thinking about names.

it seems to me that some plants, just like animals and babies, tend to be more robust if you give them names. i doubt what the name is matters to the plant any more than it does to animals or babies. it is having the name that seems to make a difference. it suggests care and concern. for quite a few years i had an avocado tree named andre and when i had to move and couldn't cram him (her?) into the tiny rental car along with every other object i considered mine, a friend offered to keep him. he moved the plant from apartment to apartment (i am convinced because the plant had a name) until a fire in his building late at night claimed the poor avocado tree. when i spoke to him next he cried, "andre was killed in a fire!"

i am not so good with plant names. i once had a violet named violet. i am pretty sure our ancient rose bush is rosie. there was code orange the orange tree (an already hilariously named gift) and the most recent, a tragic lime tree named limon. the current lemon tree is nameless because of its whimsical attitude toward living. i am trying to avoid attachment until it commits to being consistently alive but am reconsidering. it may be that the attitude comes from the lack of name. maybe lemony, after lemony snickett and his horrible, funny books. see what i mean.

but this fig tree wants a name. and i know what will happen. i will name it fig newton. or figgy pudding. or fig fig sputnik. figgy stardust. but it deserves better. i could go with one of the names my sister and brother-in-law rejected for their child. nascar astronaut. obadiah. perhaps simply adam, with a nod to the pictures in my childhood sunday school papers of the scantily clad namer of all animals. but i would welcome suggestions. any sort of help. a name you wanted to name your boy child until you had a series of girls. a name you thought would be great for your next dog until you found out you're not just allergic to flowers. the name of the car you drove in high school. suggest them here. you don't want to spend the rest of your life with the guilt of knowing you could have prevented a name like fig newton. you really don't.