Lydia was doodling in her English composition book. She was supposed to be working on a report for
her English class, but truth be told that was only one of the things she was
supposed to be doing on that Sunday afternoon.
On the grass next to her composition book was a small plastic
recorder. Her class was giving a
performance on that upcoming Wednesday, and she should have been practicing the
“Prince of Denmark March”. Her mother
told her just that morning that she should get all the clothes off the floor of
her room and she needed to get her uniform ready for school tomorrow. These were just a few of the things that were
being neglected as Lydia drew the image of the skinny, bug-eyed girl on the college-ruled
lined paper. It was far too nice a day
to waste on such miniscule things.
Yesterday had been far too nice a day as well, and procrastination had
piled all Lydia’s responsibilities onto this Sunday afternoon where they were
being slowly and deliberately ignored.
Lydia’s father was scraping at the edge of the flower garden
with a back-hoe. In truth, it was not a garden as much as it
was a patch of wild flowers that determinedly grew along the edge of the
lawn. The violets and tiger lilies were
far too ornery to go away on their own, and Lydia’s father didn’t try very hard
to force them. He simply used the hoe to
create a neutral zone between them and the lawn, so they wouldn’t encroach upon
the rest of the yard.
“Doing your homework?” he asked as his work drew him closer
to where Lydia sat. It wasn’t so much a
question as a call to action. He well
knew that she was wasting time and while he was truly concerned about her
academic success, he also knew that it would be a shame if a child wasted an
entire afternoon on work as he was doing.
“Yes, Dad,” Lydia lied as she turned her composition book
back to the page where she had begun her report. On the page, there was a chart. Across the top were the words ‘book’, ‘author’,
‘subject’ and ‘lesson’, and down the side were the names of the people she was
going to interview. Her homework was to
interview people that she knew and ask them about the last book they read, and
what they learned from it. From her
list, it could be seen that she intended to interview her father, her mother
and her little brother although she knew that she wouldn’t get much useful
information from her little brother since she could only really count on him to
be generally annoying, and after all he was only six years old. She was, in fact, going to make-up his
answers and attempt to make him sound smarter than she thought he was. She decided to take advantage of this moment,
with her father gardening very close to her, to do his interview now and at
least get a third of her homework done.
“Poppi?” she asked, getting his attention.
“Yes, Lydia,” he replied, not looking up from what he was
doing.
“What was the last book you read?”
This question caused him to pause and look up from what he
was doing and consider this for a moment.
“I think,” he began, “It was Voltaire’s ‘Candide’.”
Lydia wrote under the word book, ‘Voltayres Kandeed,’ then
she asked, “Who wrote it?”
Lydia’s father began to speak and then paused, when he
started again he said, “No, see, the book is called Candide, and the author was
a man named Voltaire.”
With a sigh of aggravation, Lydia erased what she had just
written and then, under the word book, she re-wrote the word ‘Kandeed’ and
under the word author she re-wrote the word ‘Voltayres.’ “What did you learn from it?” she asked as
she brushed away the last of the eraser fragments from her page.
Lydia’s father looked up at the sun and back down at the
mixed congregation of wild flowers at his feet.
“That I should tend my garden,” he said finally, and went back to his
hoeing.
“Thank You,” Lydia said as professionally as she thought a
real interviewer should. Her father
didn’t look up from his work. On the
page under the word ‘Type’, Lydia wrote the word “Gardening.” Before she could continue, her next-door
neighbor came over to the breast-high shrubbery that divided her father’s
property from theirs.
“Hey Don, hey Lydia,” she said.
“Afternoon, Kay,” replied Lydia’s father.
“Hello” said Lydia, barely looking up from her composition
book.
“Those things are really growin’ out of control,” said
Kay. Lydia’s father thought she was
talking about the wild flowers and was about to reply that he was attempting to
maintain a small amount of control on their growth patch, when he noticed his
neighbor was gesturing toward Lydia.
Lydia was sitting in her favorite spot in the back
yard. It was an area where five poplar
trees grew in no particular arrangement, but her neighbor was not referring to
Lydia, or the poplar trees. Also in the
area where Lydia sat was located a peculiar collection of purple and green fungus
that had been growing there for about three years. They weren’t exactly mushrooms or toadstools
either. Each one had a singular trunk
with three shoots growing out from it.
One short, and two long. From a
distance, they faintly resembled little eight-inch people with their feet
buried in the ground and their arm reaching up to the sky. They
grew in lines that seemed to connect the poplar trees and form a low fortress
of sorts in the middle of which, Lydia loved to sit. She called it her magical toadstool ring, and
protected the space from anyone who would dare to enter it. In time, her brother learned to avoid the
area unless Lydia was in it and, since the fungus did not grow there every day,
Lydia would only allow her father to cut the grass on days when they were not
there.
On this day, the fungus had grown to form fortress walls
almost a foot high and a foot thick. In
the beginning, Lydia’s parents were very concerned about letting Lydia play so
close to the strange fungus, but they didn’t seem to harm her and their
presence made Lydia so happy that it was decided that, as long as Lydia didn’t
attempt to eat any of them, which she didn’t, they could stay. Their neighbor Kay, however, did not have
such a devil-may-care attitude about them.
She fancied herself quite a citizen botanist and was amazed that she
could not find anything like the fungus in any of her gardening books. Kay loved control, and, at least to her,
knowing what everything was and being able to correctly classify it, was the
first step of control. To Kay, the
fungus in Lydia’s back yard could not be classified and was therefore suspect.
“Yes,” replied Lydia’s father finally, “there were only a
few of them yesterday.”
Lydia, who had been sitting cross-legged this entire time,
scooted on her butt over to one of the little fungus. She tapped the side of one, and a few round
spores fell off. She hadn’t seen one do
this before, so she tore a piece of paper out of her composition book, held it
under the fungus and tapped it again.
About twenty little purple spores, about a quarter the size of
peppercorns landed on the white paper.
Lydia rolled them around on the paper for a moment, then she folded the
paper with the spores inside to form a little envelope. The tucked the envelope inside her
composition book and scooted back to where she had been sitting before.
“I think they’re gonna’ start killing your poplar trees,”
admonished Kay, frowning at Lydia’s fortress.
“Well,” began Lydia’s father, who hadn’t planted the poplar
trees either and didn’t have any skin in the game on which species would win
the battle if there ever were a battle, “there doesn’t seem to be any
aggression on either part so far,” he paused and evaluated the entire area
where Lydia was sitting, “In fact, the grass seems to be greener inside the
toadstool ring that outside.” Lydia’s
father raised an eyebrow as he said this.
It wasn’t something that he hadn’t noticed before. Everyone had noticed that the grass was
greener inside the magic toadstool ring.
What was more, Lydia could play in the ring all day and not get a single
bug bite, even on days when earlier rain made the entire back yard a festering
hive of mosquitoes. What was even more
unusual was that Lydia and her brother, who argued incessantly about anything
they could think of most of the time, could play for hours in the toadstool
ring and never have a single disagreement.
This particular day, however the grass, which had been all cut at the
same time just the day before, seemed a bit longer in the middle where Lydia
was sitting.
“You know,” pressed Kay, “my brother has a landscape
business, and he would give you a good rate on taking all this yard work off
your hands,” Kay was always trying to get Lydia’s father to hire someone who
was competent in yard work to handle the greening of his backyard. “He could probably kill those things for
you.”
“Never!” yelled Lydia without looking up from her
composition book. Her face grimaced as
she tried to draw hands on her bug-eyed girl.
She had long since given up on her homework.
“I think we’ll fumble through one more Summer, thanks,”
Lydia’s father replied, “I think I’m just starting to hit my stride this year.”
Kay who was a little disappointed to hear this replied,
“Well, if you change your mind, you know who to call.” She gave the defiant fungus one more scowling
look and wandered back across her own yard.
This made Lydia quite happy. She
had no problem with Kay and sometimes even enjoyed her company, but she
considered the toadstools her friends and would have no talk of eradicating
them. For the rest of the afternoon she
drew hands and bug-eyed little girls.
The next day she woke up late.
Fumbled to get her uniform together and needed to be driven to school
because she missed the bus. In the back
of the car, she wrote that the last book her brother read was Pinocchio. He didn’t know the author and that it taught
him not to lie, and her mother read a cookbook by various authors and had
learned how to bake a cake.
Lydia’s mother never cooked.
