My next-door neighbor was walking past my house as I was coming out and we both stopped and chatted a moment.
They always plant quite the garden, but it had not been very productive this year; maybe, he said, it was that they watered it less in the drought. He marveled though at how much brighter and sunnier it is there now that my tree folk have done their work.
“Maybe it was my trees that were the problem,” said I, with a new reason to be glad the problem ones are gone now.
“But they were there before.” He was ever the diplomat.
“But they were taller this year than ever before.”
He conceded the possibility.
Then I told him the story of the Page oranges and that a three-year-old Page tree was on its way here and it was fun to watch his face break out in a huge grin like that. I knew they’d planted their own orange and nurtured it and watched it come to fruiting and he knew how much I was going to enjoy that process.
I forgot to tell him, though, that this was going to be one tree that wouldn’t shade his garden like the ones that are gone: there will be no twenty towering feet high and twenty across but rather half that at most. But then, he probably already figured that part out. And that our trees will help each other be more productive, self-fertile or no.
And here I am writing about Pages again because I can’t do anything else to make that new tanangelo come any faster–hurry, tree! I’m waiting!