Our next door neighbor is an elderly woman from an old-world country where they have old-world vultures; Armenia or Croatia or something like that. (She always wears a headscarf, makes her own tabouli and doesn't know the English word for "squirrel".) Whenever she notices us outside doing yard work she comes over to give advice because she's a much better gardener than we are.
Yesterday she said she had an apricot tree that she didn't have room for and asked if we would replant it in our yard "so when I'm gone you can remember that your neighbor gave this to you". Of course we couldn't turn down such an honor, especially after the Ricky Gervais Guide To Life podcast that taught us "a society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in." Who wouldn't want society to grow great? Or at least grow apricots?
The problem is, everything we plant in our yard does OK for a few months, then it usually dies and we go buy another plant to replace it. (It's the American way, after all.) So now we're paranoid that the apricot tree is going to die before the old woman does and we will be forever shamed as ungrateful spoiled Americans who don't know the value of nature and think that food comes from the store. We've been rehearsing scenarios in which we replace the dead tree in the middle of the night so she doesn't see it happening, but of course she's sure to recognize that it's not the original tree because she's from the old world and has special old world powers.




