3.

The hawthorn tree was my lookout over my innocent secret garden full of violets where I found treasures in the soil – colored glass marbles and tiny porcelain figurines, and where I spit out seeds from the concord grapes that grew on the antiquated arbor in our back yard. I would squeeze the juicy organ out of its purple skin with a satisfying burst to better locate the seed. I had mastered climbing the hawthorn tree without falling prey to the pins and needles growing in thick clumps. From the nearby blossoming walnut tree, I would gather the unripened fruits – walnuts are covered in a fleshy green casing that later rots away, revealing the rigid textured shell.
The walnut tree left hundreds of brains in their casings, in various states of decay scattered in the overgrown grass of the house on Prescott Street. I would collect them, the greenest, freshest ones from the branches of the tree before they fell, and peel away their coverings, smelling the scent of unripened walnut – far more pithy than freshly cut grass or immature olives. When I scraped away the their skins, it would stain my fingers and nails a faded yellow, the scrapings caught under my nails would turn black, and its smell would permeate my fingertips in a way that only oils can.
Once I fell while climbing onto the grape arbor in the middle of August, when the grapes were ripest and their mild scent strongest. In the tumble, rusty nails that protruded from the structure ran across the uppermost part of my thigh, gashing the entire back of my leg open. I screamed underneath the grape arbor, lying on my stomach in the slits of light; howling and pounding my palms on a bed of twigs and branches that had fallen from the grape vines, adorned with their perfect barky twists. A phone hit the floor from inside the open door, and my mother’s bare feet rumbled down the back porch stairs. Blood made its slow trajectory down the back of my downy leg, bristling every hair as she rushed me into the house, where I lay on the cold beige linoleum floor. She trembled to say she couldn’t stop the bleeding, it was close to my femoral artery, her brief stint as an EMT in college wasn’t adequate to deal with this, and that I would have to lay on my stomach in the back seat of the car on the way to the hospital.
The doctor in the hospital, whose skin looked like melted plastic, spared me from the terror of stitches or staples, employing a new special kind of “medical superglue,” as he explained. Was this supposed to be exciting?
I was glued, taped, padded, poked, patched and sent home. Fresh skin forged my leg back into one piece eventually, but left an unusual scar. Puffy. It was puffy, a soft white line of texture. I was told at Crossroads Christian Academy the next month that hiking up my skirt to show my impressive scar was unladylike, and no one wanted to see my bottom. Not appropriate material for show and tell. I was conscious of the scar much later, when my legs were stems, when my body fleshed out like a fig, or a bow-back mandolin. The strange sensation of the scar never escaped notice from a lover’s fingertip. My mom told me a few years ago with a new callousness that she would have just glued it herself, with superglue, if the same thing happened again now. The thought settled uneasily in my stomach.
After the fall, I nervously eyed the grape arbor from my safe perch, up in the hawthorn tree near the cyclone fence. Plucking and squeezing the clusters of lush fruits was markedly less enticing. The various trees and vines in that yard knit together overhead, a quilt of various foliage, a soft canopy that fell leaf by leaf, piece by piece, to the ground once autumn rolled through, first grade came, and the rain whole-heartedly began its chore. For that summer, or rather for some immeasurable dewdrop in time, that plot of land had been a simple sort of delicate Eden.