The Scary Old Couple

Spring is still springing, but the days are getting warmer.

While my mulberry tree is still berrying (somewhat), the days are warm enough now that the berries rot before they ripen (or ferment, which is always funny when the birds and squirrels get drunk!). I still have little kids knocking on my door asking if they can pick mulberries; but I have to tell them the mulberries are bad now.

It has always been my dream to be the eccentric old lady that all the neighborhood kids are scared of. Every neighborhood needs its scary old witch (or warlock), it's a tradition! And ever since I was little and heard my first Scary Old Lady(tm) story, I wanted to be the Scary Old Lady(tm). Not the "Get off my lawn!" type, but the type the kids tell ghost stories about ("...and every Halloween, little Timmy's voice can still be heard echoing from the witch's house!"). There's probably a true horror story in all those urban legends, but the witch and warlock when I grew up were my neighbors.

We lived right next to an incredibly old Cajun man and his wife. You never saw them go out their front door--except on Sunday mornings, of course!--and they always had their groceries delivered. All the kids were kind of scared of them, both because they never really saw them, but especially because you could never quite understand their wonderful Cajun accents. But in back--they had this enormous garden full of tomatoes and peppers and green beans and onions and even onion grass (that somehow hopped over onto our property) growing in their back yard. We had a brick wall instead of a fence between our houses, and I would sit on the wall in the summer and watch them shuffle around the garden taking care of their beloved plants. I don't know if they had children anywhere, but those plants were family to them. And sometimes they would give me a tomato, or some fresh green bean pods, and I would eat them right there, raw--even the beans!

I never jumped down into their yard to sneak a tomato, though. They were still the Scary Old Couple.

A couple years before we moved, the wife had brain surgery. She couldn't get around as well, but she would still move around through the garden, just as diligently but with much more effort. Her hair was shaved off, and she had this horrifying sickle-shaped scar on her head; she terrified me, but also made me really sad. Not long after that, she died. The old man let the garden die, too, and pretty soon I never saw him anymore, either. Just a back yard full of boxes of earth with dried sticks. I have no idea if I ever knew their names.

So now you know why I want to be the Scary Old Lady of the neighborhood.

Instead, I have a wonderfully productive mulberry tree in my front yard, and I go out and pick berries where all the kids can see, and pretty soon I'm mobbed by adorable little brats who want to know everything there is to know about mulberries, and spiders, and birds, because somehow they've learned that I'm not a Scary Old Lady, I'm the walking nature encyclopedia who lets you pick fresh berries from her tree.

(I secretly love it.)