Postcards
The postcard Neera had included was from Leo. My father told me he’d given him the address. The picture was a view of the university grounds showing my yew, though that wouldn’t mean anything to Leo, and the text in its entirety read “Signed up for an extension class at the university. Plant Identification. Starting in two weeks. Leo.”
I put it on the windowsill behind my sink.
I’d already been to El Puerto with my father since returning from Neera’s, but hadn’t mentioned the postcard because I hadn’t gotten it yet. I’d complimented him on the whiskey barrel planters he’d placed at the corners of the promenade. They were real wood ones, not the fake plastic kind, and I thought they were a good choice. I warned him not to fill them completely with soil, but to use empty plastic bottles in a layer along the bottom to improve drainage. He thanked me, and my father and I ate our dinner.
After Neera’s, I had some busy weeks at work. Blake had been asked to help create a university farm. He’d anticipated this—our administration was slower than most at recognizing the changing social landscape—and we’d been discussing plans for more than a year. Now we knew where it would be—one of the founder’s historic homes was ceding acreage from its extensive flower gardens. There was already a placard that read “Future site of the University Farm, which will enhance students’ overall educational experience as well as their understanding of the sustainability challenges that will affect their adult lives.”
Blake told me the university wanted an organic garden, a flock of laying hens, a number of beehives, and a small herd of goats.
“A tunnel greenhouse is also a possibility,” he said.
“Is there enough room for all that?” I asked.
“No,” Blake said. He rarely wasted words.
I WENT BACK OFTEN to the café where I’d seen the elderly friends who met there for coffee every day. I’d learned their names were Maris and Helen, and I liked to sit near them. They didn’t talk a lot, and when they did it was mostly about people they both knew, often illnesses related to those people. Maris, the small and thin one, liked to smoke a cigarette, for which they would both move outside and sit next to a pot of purple pansies. If it was cold, and we were having a chilly March, it took them awhile to get their coats on. Sometimes Maris read the daily horoscope out loud, her voice as low and gravelly as you’d imagine for a lifelong smoker. Helen, the tall and heavy one, listened to the brief horoscopes and together they discussed each one as if it were an important piece of news. Their mutual friends nearly covered the zodiac. If they hit a horoscope for which they couldn’t remember someone, they called out to the barista, “When were you born?” All the baristas knew them, the café owner knew them, other shopkeepers on the street knew them. They argued sometimes, but it never amounted to anything.
When little, friends play house in order to pretend to be family, which is ironic because the beauty of friends is that they are chosen, not given. Should siblings play friends? And do we make friends or find them? Emily Dickinson thought the best verb was enact.
One morning in late March, inspired by Leo, I decided to send my brother a postcard. He emailed once in a while with my father, but he and I hadn’t really been in touch for years. A postcard would travel publicly by U.S. postal service across three thousand miles, but the act of buying, writing, stamping, and sending it suddenly felt more intimate than anything else I could do. This was a broadcast to one, after all, not one and a crowd of follower-friends.
The Anneville diversity festival was in full swing. Anneville is very proud of this annual festival and the daffodils and tulips were in full bloom, so people were out in droves. I made my way through the crowds to the university gift shop, where I chose a postcard showing a photograph of the town square in winter. I found it in the seasonal discount pile: one red cardinal perched on a snow-laden evergreen branch, looking like a forgotten Christmas bauble. On the other side I wrote only, “Do they have Christmas in France?” which was a line from a movie that had made us laugh when we were kids.
That night I dreamed my brother and I were playing house. For some reason it involved a lot of cleaning. I was walking around barefoot and he was surprised. He looked down at my feet and said he couldn’t do that anymore because it hurt too much. I told him it hurt me, too, but that I’d practiced. I wiggled my toes.
Then suddenly, in that nonlinear way of dreams, we were walking in a pine forest. A guide appeared and took us to a dollhouse in the woods. He pointed out holes left by Revolutionary War–era musket fire, or so he said. My brother studied the bullet holes, while I marveled at all the beds. There was at least one in each room, all different colors. And that was the end of the dream.