029/100 aka 169/365

THE WOMAN WHO COLLECTS CHERRY PITS
Word Count: 780

The woman who collected cherry pits wore woolen skirts all year around. She wore nylon stockings rolled down and knotted at the knee the way everyone’s grandmother’s mother did at one time. She had no name that anyone knew of but answered to “Cherry” or “Cheri” or “Addie” sometimes. You would see her walking in front of the old-fashioned five-and-dime where things now sell for two dollars and up.

I’m home for the summer with my usual job at Jonas’ Landscaping. I like working outside. When it rains, they have us work downtown on the green, or the church gardens where I planted some wild garlic in with the delphinium and astilbe just because.

Summer’s are weird. We regress back to the dumb high school kids we were before we went off to college to gain knowledge and world savvy. But on campus, the beer tastes the same, the parties are still loud, and a lot of the teachers are still pompous pains in the ass. It’s a sense of freedom balanced with a sense of aloneness and we head home to come up for air and answer to nicknames we haven’t been called since we left.

Addie swept by one day as I was weeding the circles planted with petunias around every damned lamppost in town. She was singing to herself, high and soft so that no one really could make out the words. I felt the swoosh of her skirt on my back as she shuffled by, heard a rattling, clicking sound. Then it stopped.

“Oh my,” I heard. “Oh my.”

She was hunched a bit, one hand clung to a fence.

“You okay?” I asked. I went over to her, had to bend to look into her face. It was as gray as her hair, punctured by blue-blue-blue eyes.

“If I could just sit for a minute,” she said.

We shuffled up the walk to a stone bench in front of the Episcopalian Church. Her arm felt pretzel-fragile, my hand on her back like tapping a balloon in a breeze. I knew that if I let go, she would fly up into the sky.

We sat. I watched her, still holding onto her arm. “I’m all right, child,” she said, and stuck her hands in the large and deep patch pockets of her sweater. Her fingers moved inside, as if praying on rosary beads. The tick-tick of rattle and clicking started again.

“Can I get you some water?” I thought she might have become overheated. So much clothing must have been hot on the spiderweb of her body in this warm June sun. I poured some water into a cup from the pack on my bike. She sipped at it delicately, as a hummingbird sips from a bloom.

“Feel any better?” I asked and she nodded, handed the empty cup back to me and her hands crept back into the cave of her pockets. Tick-tick, I heard, tick-tick.

I asked her where she lived and she told me. I asked her if she had family in town, she said no. I asked her if she was married, had any children, and were those cherry pits in her pockets and if so, why. I wanted to stall her, to make sure that she was all right to go on. But too, I don’t think anyone ever asked her who she was before now.

“I was the senior prom queen,” she said. “Bobby McCutcheon and I were going steady back then. My dress was pink as cherry blossoms, and he brought me a double gardenia to wear on my wrist. He went away to the war but he asked me to marry him and I wore his ring and wrote to him every day.” She stopped. I waited. She seemed to have forgotten she was talking or maybe she was thinking of things she couldn’t let fly into the bright summer day. Like the photo you find in a pile of Kodachrome memories where you climb in and live for a while.

I helped her stand up and watched to make sure she was steady. She stopped every five feet or so and dropped something along the path. I followed her. She was dropping cherry pits. I caught up with her when she stopped by a bench. “Planting trees?” I asked. I thought of Johnny Appleseed.

“Oh my,” she said. “Oh my. No, we all need some way of finding our way back home.”

I really don’t know if I’m right but I believe that I understood her. And I knew for me, it would probably be the wild garlic.