Chapter 1 – Divine Procrastination

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.