The Poppy Trail
"The Poppy Trail" is my newest piece. I want to try it out some by posting excerpts here. The story follows a fanciful adventurer and his way of collecting poppy pods from neighborhood gardens, hijinks and hilarity follow (maybe not always).
Excerpts from the Poppy Trail
I don’t think anyone attends to the poppies, there are not as many as I first saw. The pods I picked on the first visit filled the bottom half of a large leaf sized trash bag. I didn’t get them all, but most. They grew among the tall grass-like vegetation as they do still. Thrilled, the first time I parked half on the road, put my “four ways” on, there wasn’t enough space because of a ditch to park entirely on the roadside. This time I do the same after spying a number of pods, but traffic proves a nuisance. Vehicles pull up behind my small pickup with its four-ways flashing and look to me to see “what’s the matter.” Just go around I say in my head. I wave them on. Wearing an old curved up Lowes baseball style cap, dressed in dirty dusty clothes, I think some of the motorists figure me for a country guy with car trouble. Nice they act so neighborly, but I just want them to move on and let me get to the business of cutting and snapping off pods...
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Most don’t know about the pods. The pods wouldn’t be here if they did. Last year I picked a few of the pods and came back later for more. I waited too long, the poppies had been mowed down and collected, along with much of the grass and weeds growing on the narrow strips along the roadside. Oddly parts of the roadside didn’t get a mowing. I couldn’t determine if the poppies had been cut for being poppies or for fire prevention or other non-poppy reasons. This year suggests the latter. Poppies have returned, but in less number and no one has yet mowed them down. I theorize someone planted them years ago and now the plants are self-seeding. It shows poppies don’t thrive as well on their own. It helps if someone looks after them.
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Once the seed takes hold it doesn’t need much but sunlight and a comparatively small amount of water. I tried to grow some poppies on Sally’s property (without her knowing it). I found spots with sunlight, which were arid (high and dry rather than low and wet), but no luck. One day, however, in late spring plants bloom in her gravel/rock driveway. It seems I dropped a couple seeds in the driveway and the sun reached through the stones to help germinate them. I am amazed and delighted, easy pickings. Sally likes the flowers, but doesn’t want any trouble for having the plants on her property. I assure her I will get rid of them (after I harvest the pods). I take the plants out, making sure plenty of seeds fall back into the driveway, but the poppies never grow back, which bolsters my diminishing return theory and is why I usually am on the trail in neighborhoods where people like to plant and grow flowers – they look after their poppies.
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With cars stopping and one woman even rolling down her window and asking if I need help I cut things short (as I like to do with poppies). Would be nice if I could say, “oh just grabbing some of these poppies here I will be gone in a few, but thanks, appreciate it.” And they would answer, “cool have a nice time.” That isn’t going to happen. One reason, they don’t say “cool.” Why – it’s city talk and something a hippy type might say. Can’t have that. The second reason, I would never mention poppies. Someone would call the cops, eliminate a spot on the trail. People generally find drugs to be bad, even though most of them are taking some kind of drug every day, go figure. ..............
What started me off on the trail? an article I read on the internet, the place where many get their start.
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I prefer an upfront guy or woman as my boss. They might be ambitious. Lots of human being trying to get ahead in this world, can’t blame someone for that. I want people who play fair even if being unfair is part of the game, just so we all understand. For a menial job, get the truck loaded and shipment on its way, the work is about the tasks. I agree to take the job, I do the tasks. A good boss knows I know that and wants that from me, to do what needs being done. He or she doesn’t want me to stand in some sort of attention when they are near or fulfill his or her ideal image of how I should look and talk.
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I make a mistake with one boss, the first time he calls me in the office for a talk I talk with him. Maybe he should have said, “just listen”. He takes it as rudeness. I consider it “going with the flo”.
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I have bicycled the city streets for years, commuting by bike to work most days. Pedaling thru a neighborhood allows you a view of homes, vegetation, streets, cats, dogs, personal monuments erected – the story of a place. On routes I used over and over, I witnessed change in the seasons, new construction, and the need for some permanence, what people will do to make home home. Even in a neighborhood where all the houses look similar, constructed with the same basic design, people often have one thing, a decoration, a plant, a something on the home or in the yard that distinguishes it.
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My bike brought me to the Poppy Trail.
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Fruit trees abound in my old neighborhood. It says something about the area. In the past, people counted on those fruit trees, fruit for deserts, pies, cobblers, cider, etc. as well as for some home remedies. That so many stand today says they still supply the neighborhood, as do gardens and garden plots. A three foot square piece of land on the side of a tool hut and someone has something planted there, maybe broccoli, or summer squash, winter squash, tomatoes, basil, etc. The smallest plot between sidewalk and the street, planted. Not every house, but enough to make a significant dent in the local markets’ possible vegetable profits. Not only vegetables, flowers color the neighborhood especially in spring and summer, and if it flowers in winter someone here grows it. Except for me (when I lived there) and few other low wage earners middle class residents (families) populate the area. They put gardening high on the list of activities outside work.
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I spotted my first spot on the trail at the start of one my favorite side street routes. Whenever I could I opted for this route. It paralleled a busy narrow thoroughfare in the neighborhood, one where I constantly needed to check on the traffic behind me (see if I could spot the vehicle who would be responsible for crushing me up against a parked car). This side street carried mostly the residents who lived near it, meaning not a lot of traffic. Only two blocks from the thoroughfare and gone - all the noise and traffic. Nice two story family homes and bungalows line the treed streets in the area. Year after year prices for homes go up in the area and year after year people fix up their places, put on additions, and in the few empty lots put up new homes, nice ones.
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The poppy plants like the work on the house and the rest of the plants and trees in and about the yard, the ones I can see, look well cared for, the dark dirt about them weedless. Could be a labor of love. They stand six feet or so from the sidewalk on the top edge of a rise of soil in front of a small fence and the green yard. I can ride by on the sidewalk (riding on the sidewalk is not uncommon for a city biker – usually because of traffic) stop in front of the poppies, scramble up the dirt, rip off the pods, with the likelihood no one will notice, especially if I wait for a time when the street are empty of neighborly eyes. Making off with pods from a plant already bloomed doesn’t strike me as the most serious of crimes – I will be down the road before someone can register my crime.
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I pass the plants several more times during the week after my poppy discovery. On the last pass I stop on the sidewalk before the plants, get off the bike, and pretend to examine the gears on my bike, thinking about making a grab as I do. During this camouflage I spy in the street just off the curb a dried pod, crushed but whole connected to a piece of stem. What? I pick it up, put it in my bag, and ride off. At home I soak the pod after shredding it my coffee grinder, put it in a cup, and pour hot water from my tea kettle over it. The water cools and I pour it and the hay (shredded pod) thru a sieve into another cup. Then, bottom’s up, hoping I am not consuming street toxins.
Fifteen minutes later, “holy cow”, I feel a buzz coming on. Calm and a touch of elation visit for the next four hours. Amazing. That makes my mind up.
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In case, I zig zag, turning up and down different streets and parking lots on my way back to my apartment. Doesn’t hurt to be hard to catch. I arrive home, look at the clock, “why not”, I put one of the dried pods in the coffee grinder, gather the hay in a glass, and pour hot tea water over it. My drink cools while I change clothes for work. I gulp my drink down and head to work.
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I started commuting by bike after getting a job at a thrift store. A donation attendant lets it be known, after I show a keen interest in a just donated mountain bike, it is no concern of his if one of a bunch of bikes waiting to be “checked in” disappear, in fact he wouldn’t even know if one did (and he was going to the “can” and goodbye, since I am headed home). He leaves the donation dock for the bathroom and I leave for home on a cheap used mountain bike. It’s a solution to my commuting needs and have been thinking about buying one, though I can’t afford one, which is why I am taking the job at the thrift store.
I would have chosen car, if I had the choice. I considered walking and would have if the distance wasn’t prohibitive (it would take an hour and a half to get there by foot). Before the bike, public transit, meaning the bus, supplied my ride. On some days and routes, the bus makes for a great ride. Get in, find a nice seat, sit back and watch the traffic and city pass, resting your bones after a hard day’s work. But often my overcrowded bus offered no place to sit, or sometimes a place near a disturbed individual, I remember one who needed to gesticulate while listening to monotonous rap music, which bled from his ear phones, and ones who found me distasteful (I do look a little rough at times) and occasionally a mean individual looking to hurt someone. Not the kind of company that invites a nice rest.
I preferred my own company to the annoying sometime dangerous bus society. A bike seemed a good solution. Perhaps coming from a family that never owned a car made a difference. Friends of mine could not fathom life without a personal motor vehicle. They would beg, borrow, and consider stealing for one. For some, it not only provided needed transportation, it included you in the human part of the human race, without one you were not quite “right”. My younger me got around without one, to the same places as my friends and peers with vehicles, most times. Although plenty of times I wished I had a ride.
The bike proved a “godsend” (mysterious are the ways of the lord?). How else would I see a group of Asian men tumbling out a door throwing punches in a residential neighborhood at five in the morning. Better yet the sun’s early arrival, cats returning to their doorsteps after their evening roam, the crows’ boisterous warnings, the rhythm of the pedals, thoughts and poetry in the early morning and still early evening. Bikes do have advantages, and interesting aspects, did I tell you I fell asleep several times while riding my bike on hot day returning from a hard day at work, got to be careful of that incessant pedaling rhythm when you are tired ( woke up just in time to steer away from the back of a car).
(more to come)
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