Sometimes, when we’re not looking, death has the ability to grow by the inch.
Outside my bedroom window, facing the backyard, a white oleander tree has littered hundreds of poisonous white flowers. The tree is positioned in the corner of the fence with a full head of hair that hangs into two of my neighbor’s backyards. An underground network of roots has pushed its way through another season, reaching for something underneath the earth, using its first instinct…to live.
At night, I become a silhouette and stand at the window. My gaze casts long shadows across the glow-white speckled dirt. With each flower that drops to the ground, more questions surface. I remind myself, beauty is often overlooked. From behind the glass, I engage like a curious ghost. Right now, I see the conflict, the conversation between good and bad—all induced by a caliber of self-inflicted questions about beauty and death. Like this tree, is it possible to be liked and disliked, all at the same time? Are we all just one of the same?
Living with such a large tree requires me to sweat. Sometimes I rake the flowers into organized circular piles, followed by weeks of waiting, as the pools of petals begin to wilt into one another, becoming a dry and crunchy mess. When clouds of dust rise it’s a sign I’m making progress. I think of the master gardener who gave me a complimentary consultation on my backyard and spent an hour and twenty minutes talking about “weed control.” It was a hundred and three degrees outside that day. The dead flowers mean nothing to me now as I place them in plastic bags and into the apartment complex’s dumpster. The apartment complex doesn’t have a green waste container, so my partial composting efforts are wasteful. And my calculations of a renter’s responsibility have shifted into knowing what I’m really doing is dirt management. Walking away from the dumpster, I think of the flowers being shipped to the landfill, and eventually spilling free from the inevitable snags to the Dollar Tree lawn and leaf bags.
Is it possible to co-exist with this tree? What are we here to teach each other? Drifting so far from the genetics of a tree can put us odds with ourselves, apart from nature. From the window, again, I see the fullness of the moon twist itself through the branches of the tree and onto the white sheer linen drapes of my bedroom. A liquid blue haze cascades down each of my arms. To the opossum taking a contemplative break from his wobbly journey along the top of the fence, I could be a threat. Neither of us move. I drift into remorse, loss, and of my own reflection. I watch the opossum move a few inches towards the direction of the tree. It will be a refuge, once he arrives…soft branches with chewy green leaves, and endless intersections will become available to him, something the fence will never provide.
This home is not forever, but it’s where I live now—a Fresno neighborhood with a mix of working class professionals and senior citizens. Our backyards live back-to-back to one another. The noises of the neighborhood, our work afterlives, become alive, and quietly become intertwined into the weekday evenings. All of us move in and out of the resistance, the deadpan heat, while some of us grow weary from the hum of our air conditioning units. Eventually, we’ll crave something finer, more than just fresh, cool air.
The more I see, the more I see who else is connected to the oleander tree. My dog carries the flowers into the house with ones that have collected between his toes and have become tucked within his long fur. His innocence in transporting the deadly flowers into the house breaks me from concentration of the crop circles—all the walking of back and forth across the carpet. I leave my thoughts about future careers in a confessional heap on the floor. My cat, the color of dirty snow, races past me, hysterical in her white happiness, and drops the poisonous petals from her teeth. A year ago, my mother gave her to me as a birthday gift. The first thing I learned was cats could smile. I retreat to the hall closet to retrieve the vacuum. I begin to suck up the silken floral bodies, while others slip away like refugees and hide beneath rugs, curling up in dark corners—a mix between disappearing and dying—under dressers and desks, borders I cannot reach.
This is the confetti of my era.
The twelve-foot oleander tree leans over the fence and into two of my neighbor’s properties, littering an equal amount of poisonous petals onto their patios. My mother tells me it’s only poisonous if someone were to eat the flowers; the poison is in the oil from the leaves and flowers.
My neighbor says one day to me, with the tops of our heads over our shared fence that she’d like to pour Round Up on my side of the fence. She’s talking to me in between the brisk movements of her broom that is scratching across her patio. I wait for her to stop sweeping the cement…scratch, scratch…and make eye contact with me after her last statement. She continues sweeping for a few more whisks and peeks back over the fence at me. I’m standing under the tree looking up. It’s blooming, again.
Later, I’ll stand behind the sliding glass door, the tree in view, and will feel a heavy remorse press its nails into my chest for having played along with her toxic suggestion. By not responding, I responded. I need to speak for the tree. I stare at the white oleander, and tonight, it has my full attention. I’m not capable of killing a tree, poisonous or not. It’s not that simple. Who are we to decide if a tree should die? Two months after renting the house, I learned the tree had been a discussion of death for some time. Some had proposed to chop it down, while others protested it would still grow back. The roots had to be pulled, other argued. If I agreed to the killing I would offend someone, someone like myself. Removing the tree may only be a temporary fix, and then, there will be something else, weeds, and another tree, something else for the community to focus on. How would I sleep at night with a big cavity at the corner of the fence, knowing the swollen moon no longer had something to detract its light?
My cat sits upright, frozen in her stare looking out from the sliding glass door, watching the doves eat the seed I’ve left in a large metal bowl in a plant stand. She must wonder what it’s like on the outside, what it would be like to climb up the tree and swing from one branch to the next, white flowers raining everywhere.
* * *
My mother is coming down the hill to cheer me up; we’ve decided to paint my window-less bathroom, a long-awaited project in the short time I’ve lived here. The biggest wall in the bathroom, opposite of the mirror and sink, is wallpapered. The wallpaper consists of country kitchen blue ribbons with floating lotus flowers against a dirty beige background. My mother tells me whoever hung the wallpaper did such a great job that it will be impossible to remove without having to resurface the wall. I watch the flat of her hand move down the wall. After her evaluation, she tells me we can simply paint over it. She brought with her a gallon of taupe paint she had in her garage, leftover from her ‘paint phase’ when dad was homebound, dying of cancer. I am more then grateful for the paint, and at this point, any color will work. My mother also brought her two-foot pruning sheers. We discover my bathroom isn’t big enough for two people, so while my mother begins to paint, I go to find the pruning sheers and head to the backyard. I go to the four-foot shoots, better known as “suckers,” which are growing from the base of the oleander tree. Suckers slowly choke the life out from a tree, hence, how they got their name. My mother says, in order to prune, I must position my hands as close to the edge of the handles as possible. I see life in everything, even in the lushness of green weeds that have the freedom to flower in my backyard. Snap! I’m a clumsy clipper, but one of the stalks slowly breaks away, and falls gently to the ground. And, again, snap! Another one falls to the ground, but this time, exposing a set of little black eyes. Looking straight up at me is a dove. We are locked in a gaze, shocked by each other’s invasion, coming within inches of the deadly error—seconds from snipping off her head. Paralyzed by fear, we both wait to see what the other will do. I make the first move. I squat, taking a closer look at her. She’s nestled between the stalks. I watch her fear move into sadness. I run inside, calling for my mother. In the distance between the backyard and the bathroom, where my mother is, I imagine saving the bird. I can see myself feeding it in the cage we’ve built for it along the fence. And eventually, the dove will come to trust me, sit on my finger, even shoulder, as we sit in the backyard. It will trust me to bathe it and nurture it back to health. Once I set her free, she’ll come and visit me. I will spot her amongst the other doves. She’ll help me fill in the blank spots in the book of love I’m writing.
My mother reaches for the dove with her bare hands. The dove slips out between my mothers’ grip and flies a few inches, bounces off the fence, until she makes a soft landing onto a bed of weeds. My mother instructs me to go get a bowl of water. Get a bowl of water. I know it’s in this extended moment—between life and death—that my mother is attempting to prepare me. Secretly, she knows the dove is dying. My mother will keep me busy, reducing my list of questions. I run into the kitchen and grab a large clay bowl—I use it for salads. I fill the bowl with cool water from the kitchen sink and carry it outside.
The moments between the sink and reaching my mother become blurry. I remember there was heat wave that day and I tried convincing myself the dove was probably dehydrated and that’s why she was stuck in the shoots. The mantra had repeated.
My mother holds the dove again and tips her beak into the bowl of water. I see her swallow, but my will mother later tells me that she was gasping. Maybe in death there is little difference between swallows and gasps. The dove and I never break eye contact while she’s being angled towards the water. I still have faith.
My mother dips the dove’s beak back into the water, but this time her neck just hangs there as my mother moves her beak up and out of the water. Later, my mother will tell me, this is when she knew the dove wasn’t going to make it. The dove died in my mother’s hands.
Once inside, my mother asked if I wanted her to bury the dove on her property.
I shook my head yes, and thanked her. We took a break from everything and went searching for new towel bars for my bathroom. In the car, my mother realized that last night a bird had died in her dreams. I knew it to be a sign, maybe that things were about to change.
Before my mother leaves to go back home, I find an Ann Taylor shoebox with some white tissue inside and give it to my mother to use to bury the dove. Not even an hour after she leaves my house, I imagine my mother driving home, close to two thousand feet in elevation. The dove belongs in the Sierra foothills and far from the oleander. Even in the small currents of our understanding, we pause to offer what the earth quietly takes back.
