Words in a Row: Marty Cherryseed and the Good Bad Idea

My youngest son crawls beneath my gramma's quilt these mountain summer mornings. I brace myself to brave the scuffed pine floor in my bare feet as he flops on his stomach and places vintage comics on my extra pillow. I leave him to my warm bed, leave him to carefully turn fragile pages, to become a penguin in a starched tuxedo, a lump-headed dinosaur chasing foolish researchers in some forgotten rainforest. His older brother doesn't join us, doesn't wake until I force his eyelids apart with a sharp shake.

Two days after school ended, Martin didn't carry comics to my morning bed. I tried to leave the sleep on my pillow, to drop it from my arms with a groan, a brush, but it clung to my skin, heavy, proud. I wrapped a chenille robe over faded men's pajamas and prepared to stretch my arms, my mind toward the ball of fire that hesitated along the horizon. My legs creaked as I formed the first asana. Martin giggled.

"Mom, you sound like an old lady."

His hands held a slim book with a worn cover. I didn't speak. My shoulders guided my extended hands to the floor. Hair fell across my eyes, nose, mouth, heart. I let myself become a triangle, downward dog, feet and palms flat against pine, butt in the air. Martin giggled again.

"Mom?"

He slapped the book shut.

"Yeah?"

I huffed my response. The sun didn't notice my discomfort. She stretched her rays across the Great Plains in heavenly asana, lent warmth first to the ghost town fourteen miles away, then the weed-caked airstrip where Lindbergh once landed, the criss-cross of arroyo and sage, the foundation of my home crafted from sturdy penitentiary tiles eight decades ago. I wondered whether those long-dead prisoners scratched notes in the New Mexican clay, left me pleas for cigarettes, for a perfumed letter. They paid their debt one small square rural home at at time.

"Mom, can we go for a walk?"

I lowered my butt, pressed my abdomen close to the ground, lifted my head. My hips creaked this time, a rich echo of ligament firecracker, and Martin imitated the sound with a raspberry explosion of forced air through pursed lips. I dropped the pose, let my chest rest against the floor.

"Yeah, sure. Let's go for a walk. The sun doesn't want my salutation today."

My son jumped off the bed and ran to the kitchen. I heard him open the fridge, heard the rustle of produce bag against drawer. He left his book on my pillow. Seedfolk, by Paul Fleischman. I smiled, pulled a clean t-shirt over my head and remembered the story of a girl named Kim, a girl who planted dried lima beans in a garbage-filled vacant lot to try to make her dead father's spirit notice her, remembered the way the author let a new character speak each chapter, let them tell their own story of harsh life in the city, of the welcome sight and hope those struggling bean plants offered. Martin asked me to buy him the book after his teacher read it aloud in class. We read it at home together, then he read it again, once, twice. I heard the splash of running water, and slipped my feet into beat running shoes.

We headed out the door, into the alley, past the shack with the angry chained pit bull, past a graffiti-sprayed fence. Martin handed me a plastic baggie filled with cherries. I grinned, grabbed one, and sucked the sweet flesh off the pit. Martin ate one, too, but he didn't spit the seed into the alley like me. He stopped walking, bent low, and dug a tiny hole into the dirt road. He dropped the pit inside, then carefully covered it with a gentle pat. I shrugged my shoulders. We ate another cherry. Spit. Plant. The cycle repeated until we held the last two cherries in our hands. Spit. Plant.

"Marty, I think it's great you're planting the seeds, but they probably won't grow in this alley. It takes a long time to grow a cherry tree."

Martin paused, his hands red with fruit stain. The sun continued her ascent, giving his fair hair a jolt of mountain fire. The parish priest hustled past us in his long cassock without returning our Good Morning. The pit-bull lurched with a nasty growl.

"Mom. You read Seedfolk. I'm just like Kim. I'm planting seeds where people say nothing will grow. And just watch, Mom. I will get to meet a hundred neighbors when my cherry trees grow, and they will plant their own trees. I'm making our town better one cherry seed at a time."

Five weeks later, those cherry seeds have taken precarious root. A dozen seedlings wink from the red clay. Martin and I surrounded each one with a little chicken wire barrier and a sign: "Cherry Tree Under Construction. Be careful!"

And yes, one neighbor, another, a dozen have stopped us, have asked about his trees, heard about his favorite book. I patted him on the head the other night and told him I was wrong, that one cherry seed can make a difference.

"Mom, there is no such thing as a bad seed."

Our stories exist in potential, in encapsulated seed, just like Martin's cherries. We keep them in the fridge, on ice, don't even realize we have them packed in a produce drawer. Every seed we own has the potential to sprout, to flower, to bring people together in a dirt alley full of chained pit-bulls and stray cans of Tecate.

During that morning walk with my son, I didn't realize I treat my writing they way he treated our cherry pits. When I don't know what to write, I sit quietly for a moment and write down three things that happened the day before, three observations, three people. Three lists of three. They don't have to be huge things, good things, funny things, or important things. Here is the actual list I produced the day after Martin first planted his seeds:

People:

The pit-bull in the alley

Martin and his comic books

The mean priest who called me a "heathen." (I MUST tell this story soon!)

Three things that happened:

Martin burying his cherry seeds
Body creaking during the sun salutation
The pit-bull lurching at the priest

Three observations:

I wonder what the pen-tile prisoners thought when they made those tiles?
The sun must hit that ghost town first.
It's hard to do downward dog if you don't tie your hair in a ponytail first.

Every story begins with a who, a what, a series of time-lapsed scenes surrounding the who and the what. Tell me your three sets of three in comments below. Let's build a story, each one of us, a story from a seed we think might be bad, be dumb, be inconsequential. My son planted seeds I expected to stagnate. He didn't realize it, but he also handed me a beautiful story, and gave my neighbors one more reason to live.

Birdie Jaworski is speaking on the BlogHer 2007 Storytelling panel. She blogs at La Pajaro. Birdie's book of short stories set in her hometown of Las Vegas, New Mexico, is being published this year. And yes, she wrote three sets of three for every story in the book.

Submitted by Birdie Jaworski (view blog

) on Tue, 07/17/2007 - 17:07

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i'm coming late to the party but here goes

3 people:
-my beautiful son, S., nine years old, at the Folk Festival in his tangled mop of hair and wide-brimmed hat
-my man, T.
-the acquaintance i hadn't seen before my cancer diagnosis

3 things that happened:
-a light heart was made heavy by sad stories
-a heavy heart was made light again by music and love
-all liquids consumed were eventually worn - by me, not the kid! i smell like coffee, beer and tamarind sauce.

3 observations:
-the fact that i have cancer makes some people need to tell me about everyone they know with cancer and how terrible it all is.
-after 16 years, my partner can read me like a book.
-i am sometimes no more mature than my kids.

laurie
www.notjustaboutcancer.blogspot.com

Submitted by laurie on Sat, 08/18/2007 - 19:00