DAY 24: You can plant anything

DELAND, FLORIDA | FRIDAY, APRIL 2, 2010 – Ahhh, Sunshine State. Without history. Here today, full. Erased next day by termites and hurricanes. But not now, not spring. Becoming. The monsoon on arrival passed after a day. Then sun and more sun each day since. The air is thick now with orange blossoms, more than before, everywhere you go, the perfume, heavier and sweeter. Adrienne said, blown away by it, wanting to speak it, so full in the air - we were driving past a grove, Dick Marshall’s old grove of 500 trees, navels and hamlins, she said, “It’s like jasmine. Jasmine tea. It’s like a tea.”

Ambrosia. And so hot. The air is hot and dry and dusty, not yet muggy, not yet stratified by degrees of wet. Yellow Truck’s windows rolled down. Bouncing along familiar roads on short trips, to the marsh, to walk, to count gators and haunt birds, to the river to sit, and again, back to the river, again to sit, the breeze whipping over the black water, the sun blindingly bright, the boats idling by, smell of gasoline, people in chairs on the banks, fishing.

March is Central Florida’s month of heaven. It is the time to visit, in March, and now, the first days of April. Guineas on a farm, those odd, turtle-backed birds that are territorial enough to stand in sometimes for rottweillers - when they charged Yellow Truck we were after fresh eggs, easing in second gear down an unmarked sand road – the scuttling birds, Adrienne said, were like masked Venetians. Strange, hot, transforming light. Spring. You can plant anything.

We have been here five days now, give or take, and not once to the beach. I have to think, but that is true. Not once to the beach.

And not one bit of work. Not until today, finally we broke down. But it’s true, too, the day before, I chopped and sawed at trees until my shirt was dark, sweaty, cutting from the ground and up two stories on a 28-foot ladder, and in the trees themselves, I cut away until I’d carved back alleyways for the breeze to run and rise beside the house's old siding. We said when we got here, and before, when we were on our way down, driving along, This time we won’t work. We won’t be under the gun.

This time we wouldn’t be renovating a bathroom or whatnot from arrival until the mad dash back to the airport in a rented car, things still unfinished, depending on our man in Florida, Dave Heerin, to be the closer, to swoop in with his easy ways, his days that join together only at Bill’s restaurant, the only fulcrum in his lateral days of McSweeney’s high rhetoric, the coffee and sandwich he orders across the counter downtown at Bill’s – this time we wouldn’t have to ask Dave to complete the job. We wouldn’t start one, not anything we couldn’t finish ourselves.

Today it was so easy though. Georgia, the young cellist who is studying down the street at Stetson U. for her MBA, had come out to the back stoop the day before, let us know about a leak below the kitchen sink. Dave and I looked at it, sized it up. It has been a stubborn faucet, always wanting to leak and then fill with rust and then stop up and then leak again. It was the first faucet I ever put in, with my Cousin Mike. He came down by Amtrak from Maine, brought clamps and sawhorses and I half-watched while he repaired window frames. He told me never to hurry, to not push on with a job when the steam ebbed, instead retire for the day and return. We put in a tile countertop, a double sink, repaired the porch threshold. We worked away. All of that work is still good and still ours. Just the faucet that finally tired.

Dave said he’d put in the new one, so Adrienne and I could keep going on getting packed. We were planning on leaving tomorrow sometime. We’ve been hoping a guy in Holly Hill, over by the beach, would come through with a fresh batch of pure, one-hundred percent recycled biodiesel. We've cobbled together three extra cans to fill while digging through the garage. But the biodiesel guy was waiting on something, someone, before he could run his first part of the process, something about methane burning off. So I said I’d put in the new faucet. And then I asked Adrienne if she’d help and she said she would. The old one came right out. No whining, no beating frozen up washer rings for an hour. And then the new one went right in. Me under the sink, my head above the plastic pan catching the drips, and Adrienne above, twisting in the faucets while she talked on the phone. Done, in maybe a half-hour, just as Georgia and her mum came in.

Maybe we should paint some, me and Adrienne were saying. Maybe we should scrape the bad places and paint. Or maybe paint the whole house. We had the fever again. We could get something done, we could work a couple days, brighten up the house. And then the biodiesel would be ready and off we’d go.

As we drove down a back road, moving through the afternoon, the orange blossom in the air, pole barns, cattle in the fields, on our way to the Shady Oak for a sundown drink by the river, all our errands done, I said - I’d been waiting and the moment seemed to be right, Could you see living here for a few months out of the year? Two or three? When we’re a lot older, toward the end, down the road?

A few, yes, she said, emphasizing the few, holding it to about two without saying it exactly. The west, the pacific northwest, is our plan after all. And she was smiling. It wasn’t only my idea. I'd spoken it, but it had already been there, between us, around us. All this, the road, and maybe nothingness, was materializing, like a mantle, settling, blinding bits of light settling on us from the spaces between the trees rushing past.