Watering A Little Tree

The freestone peaches are sliced, coolly golden with jagged scarlet edges, coated in a drizzle of honey.  I am going to carry the bowl out to our farthest back yard, out in the weeds that are burned dry and prickly crisp.  My feet are bare.  I'm wearing shorts and a shirt.  It will probably be hot again today because it's August now.

The sleeping cats hear me step outside onto the patio with my bowl and think they might be fed.  No.  I don't have food for the cats, but I stroke them and murmur to them, tell them they're ugly and have no brains.  They purr and stretch.  When they realize they'll have to wait longer for food, they sit down in their places and look around sweetly with sleep rumpling their fur.

Across the patio to the adobe bricks all worn and then dirt beyond, my feet pick their way along the smoothest path but still get poked and scratched by stiff weed skeletons.  Foxtails and burrs sometimes stick and I have to stop to pull them off my skin.  I'm dragging a hose with me, its end connected to a spigot in the front yard.  It's a long old gray-green hose with banged-up brass threads that cannot connect to anything else.  I drop the hose in the basin of a small bedraggled and stunted peach tree in the far corner of the yard, set my bowl down in the dirt and trot back to the spigot, turn it on, and back to the tree again.  The bowl of peaches and my fork clink when I pick them up.

This is where I come at dawn in the summer.  I am nine.  I have lived here for six years, almost as long as I can remember, and I have not imagined living anywhere else.  I believe we are rich.

The gurgling flow of water begins to slowly fill the basin around the peach tree.  I sit on the lip of the basin and put my feet into the water, dig my toes into the mica-flickering mud, and eat the tangy golden fruit in my bowl.  I water this peach tree because no one else does, because I like to eat peaches, because I have something of my own to take care of.  I water the tree because I love the sound of water and my feet to be in warm mud and see the sun rise up beyond our grapestake fence, backlighting zig-zagging insects and the leaves on the little peach tree.

My legs are browned from the sun and have little golden hairs that hold the light dust of the yard I'd moved across.  It's getting warm already.  I look at the tree and its leaves, small branches, slender trunk with peeling rough texture like old ruined paint curling up.  I don't talk to the tree, but I sense it might know I'm near and might feel encouraged.  I see that it has not died and might live, even make fruit when it grows up.  I pat it.

I reach my hands down into the mud and mold some around the base of the trunk of the tree, reinforce the lip of the basin.  All I know is a tree needs water and dirt, so that's what I make sure it has.  I water the tree and sit with it in the morning and think about things.  I don't want anything to change at all, not even to change to afternoon from morning, don't want to go back to school or people to ask me to do things I'm not sure of or to hear adults yelling.  I breathe quietly and hear the morning's little sounds.

My peaches are eaten now, and the basin is nearly brimming.  I get up to go back and turn off the water and trot back to watch the water sink slowly back into the soft earth, and before I can do anything about it, it's gone, leaving only a dark brown wet circle around the little tree that stands alone in the hot sun.