"Music Takes Time"

What a crappy photo. I promise, that squash is not swarmed with bugs. That's just my phone's camera adding specks.

Lucas came back to check on the seedling two days after the seed was planted.

"It's not ready yet," Old Man Bones, who watched over things that grow, told him. "Go home and practice. Da-DUM, da-DUM, da-DUM. That's right." Lucas frowned but marched home, tapping out a simple rhythm on his belly.

Lucas waited a month before he marched back to visit Bones, beating the same simple rhythm that the old man had given him to work with the last time. "Still not ready for you yet," Bones said, "but come here, look at this." He turned the fruit over for Lucas to see. "See this little groove right here? This little notch?" Lucas nodded and pretended that he did. "That's going to be important. You've got to be ready to play it. So try it with some extra notes. Da-DUM, da-da-DA-dum." Lucas practiced for weeks without understanding the point of it, until one day, when, tapping the rhythm against his arm, his finger twitched and struck the bone of his wrist instead. The feeling was completely different. That's all that music was, he realized: paying attention to how the slightest changes felt.

He and Old Man Bones continued like that over the following weeks, the old man giving him new steps in his rhythm each time. Finally, summer ended, and the time for harvest came. Old Man Bones gave Lucas a beautiful drum, plucked straight from the vine. "Now it's ready for you," he told the boy, who ran off and began to play. And you're ready for it, Bones' inner voice added as they both enjoyed the fruits of their labor.

"The Pepper Plant"

 

Eddi was twelve weeks into the pregnancy when she bought the pepper plant.

"I feel like I need the practice," she told the clerk at the garden center.

She actually felt that she needed some kind of distraction, something that wasn't a baby book or a question about her child-rearing plans from an eager co-worker that would leave her worrying away the rest of the afternoon. And she had always loved the taste and the color of hot peppers. She took the plant home, gave it new soil, and applied an Epsom salt solution to its leaves.

Once the plant, a cayenne, had produced several fruit, Eddi snipped one of the peppers and sliced off the tip. She was well into the second trimester by that point. She brought the piece to her mouth and began to nibble on it. Immediately she wanted to cry.

The burn of it was horrible, nothing like she remembered or had expected. Her stomach had felt like a minefield flooded with acid throughout the previous months, but she had still hoped to be able to enjoy some of what she had worked so hard to grow.

She called her mother.

"I can't do this," Eddi wailed into the phone, "I don't know what I was thinking. I can't do this."

"Do what?" her mother said. "Honey, is this about the baby?"

"I just wanted to eat a pepper," Eddi said.

She couldn't stand to look at the pepper plant the next morning, and she was hardly able to look at it the day after that. She did, however, check on it three days later. Its leaves were drooping. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry," she whispered as she silently urged the water to fill the watering can. It didn't matter that she couldn't eat the peppers; it was still her plant. Yet she wasn't as worried as she thought she should've been. Somewhere deep inside of her, a voice was saying, It's all right, it's all right.