When Better Is Good, Chapter 2: Bad Blues

 

Chapter 1 was the hearth story—better not to break your face.

This second one has to do with the jugs.

You can see, out the window, Paulson’s privy. He reads in there. And alongside are the compost bins. What you can’t see in the grass are plastic gallon milk jugs with their bottoms cut out. This isn’t due to your failing eyesight or my bad camera. They’re not out there anymore.

Did Paulson have to use jugs for his seedlings, make it look like we were going into the junkyard business? Also why the all-different stakes in the garden for holding up his electric wire—some black, some white like Snaggle-Tooth Louie’s crooked mouthful? “I ran out of the others,” Paulson explained. “The white were all I had left. “Then buy more,” I begged. “Dark. And those trees or whatever they are, use chicken wire. Not sore-thumb jugs.”

Then the well’s hand-pump system he ordered by mail for in case the world ended, when the pieces arrived in a mammoth cardboard tube, included a blue cap for the well. Blue? What ailed that manufacturing company? Not the blue of the sky, the jays, the buntings, the chickweed, oh no, but the same hideous blue as those emergency tarps FEMA hands out to hurricane victims whose roofs have blown off. The pump’s other above-ground parts—a section of pipe, and the pump handle—an ordinary gray, tied in fine with the piles of rocks by the well, but I fumed.

Thank the Lord, one day my husband brought home cans of spray paint from Rocking R, three different grays. He had me pick out the best and, zzzzzt, restored me to sanity.

Weeks later, I spotted the blue plastic bucket. Tarp blue. My word. It was sitting by the new faucet. Paulson had put the bucket there to catch drinks for his plants and Frankie, our cat. “Not blue!” I shrieked. I rushed around hunting for something else that might work and landed on our big old kettle from Paulson’s grandmother, heavy pocked aluminum, good for not much, anymore. “This,” I said. “Use this.”

It’s still out there, tucked beneath the spout, congruent with the hulking rocks, full to the brim with blackish water and algae.

All this relates to my spat with Noemi, she of the vermilion flowers. Better can be good. It can, it can. I shouldn’t have jumped on her like that.