Page 10 of Big Island Moonlight
“No, it’s because your little cousin is sitting on my bladder!”
Kai laughed and went back to his book.
“I won’t be gone long,” Emma said, walking towards the lanai. “Do you need anything from town?”
“Bittermelon?”
Emma wrinkled her nose. “Really?”
“Pregnancy cravings are weird,” Jun said with a shrug. “You know that produce stand around the corner? They should have some.”
“Okay, I’ll pick some up on my way home.”
“You’re the best.”
“I know.” Emma winked at her niece and went inside to grab a pair of shoes.
“And grapefruit!” Jun called through the open window.
“Okay!”
“Thank you!” she sang.
Emma tucked a pair of garden gloves and her favorite shears into her pockets and set out towards town.
Walking down the road, she cherished the soundscape of Pualena: the sea breeze rustling leaves high overhead, the distant barking of dogs, the abundance of birdsong. It wasn’t so different from her childhood home in the redwoods, really.
It looked different, of course. Back there, the world was reddish brown dotted with bits of color. In Hawai‘i, the world was painted with a liberal hand. Vibrant greenery was everywhere, splashed with great splotches of red and orange and yellow. And the smell was different: damp earth and tropical flowers instead of the dry spice of fallen pine needles. But the deep peace that came from being surrounded by live growing things… that was the same.
The community garden was filled with green growing things as well… unfortunately, most of them hadn’t been deliberately planted there. Stubborn grasses peeked up out of the sides of the garden beds, and a whole host of wind-blown seeds had taken root.
Emma weeded her garden nearly every day to keep ahead of the many unwelcome plants that tried to take up residence in the rich soil of her beds. The community garden, on the other hand, was out of sight and out of mind. If she let a week or two slip by without visiting, the weeds started to outpace everything else – and despite the schedule she had drawn up, the other volunteers didn’t seem to be showing up on their days.
Other people in the community did occasionally show up and plant things, which made it exponentially more difficult for Emma to differentiate between opportunistic weeds and young plants that people were growing deliberately. She had learned a lot in the past year or so, but differentiating between vegetables and weeds at a glance when they were only a few inches tall… that was still beyond her.
To weed or not to weed?she texted Keith, attaching a picture of some seedlings she didn’t recognize.
That is the question, he shot back.
Unhelpful.
That garden needs more mulch.
When’s the last time you tried to get a truckload of that stuff? It’s like gold dust over here! There’s a waiting list six months long!
She had resorted to buying bags of mulch at the store to use in her own garden beds, but they were silly expensive. Covering the neglected community garden with pricy mulch felt like an exercise in futility… but then, so did her weekly weeding efforts as the jungle began to creep back in.
“Maybe big community work days every couple of weeks would be more realistic than scheduling volunteers,” she mused aloud.
The moment she realized that she was talking to herself, she wrinkled her nose and knelt down to work. Too much time with plants. Getting other people into the garden would probably be a good idea.
Since she was still unsure which of the little plants in the beds were weeds, she set about pulling up the stubborn grass that had grown in around the young pineapple plants. She had planted the tops of dozens of pineapples with the playschool kids and had a nice crop growing at the back of the garden… but the grass kept trying to grow over them.
The perennial peanut she had learned about in her permaculture classes was supposed to cover the ground between plants so that weeds couldn’t take root, but so far her ground cover seemed to be fighting a losing battle against the grass that had been thriving there for years.
As often happened when she was gardening, time melted away. She drifted into a state of perfect zen, pulling up bits of grass and listening to the birds chat back and forth.
“You’re in your element.”
