The Scarred Pepper Tree

1

I ’ve had it with this worthless pepper tree! Grandmother barked. This time it goes! The thud hurt Dolores’s ears and frightened the heck out of a pair of tiny hummingbirds hovering around the unfortunate tree.

It stays! Grandfather hissed back.

It goes! insisted his irate mate.

And I say, if you make it go, we will go too! threatened Grandfather as he waved his index finger in the air, not daring to point it directly at his wife. I will have hummingbird babies if it’s the last thing I do! he added for more effect.

Dolores’s grandparents had been at loggerheads for weeks and yet, the pepper tree still stood, both misshapen and glorious.

What do you think, Lolo? You love the hummies, right? demanded Grandfather of his granddaughter, as if what she thought made any difference. Grandfather refused to oblige his wife in calling his little princess Dolores, a name he thought was best suited to a cranky 80-year-old. Dolores didn’t mind her name but preferred the welcoming way Lolo sounded as it flipped off Grandfather’s tongue, since he was the one who came up with the cute short version for Dolores. The nickname Lolo drove Grandmother batty.

Don’t you ask her to take sides, Grandmother pressed before Lolo had a chance to respond. Lolo was used to the bickering. But being used to something didn’t mean it was enjoyable. On and on they went without paying any attention to how their endless squabbling affected their grandchild. Lolo preferred things to be nice and quiet.

When her grandparents argued long like this, Lolo would sneak away from the rambling, musty yellow house along the precipice of the coastal oak-lined canyon. The canyon has become her backyard.

Hush Maile, she whispered to Grandmother’s yappy Maltese as she slipped through the rusty door into the rugged wild. Scents of withered blue sage and rosemary brought instant peace as the bickering voices of the grownups were left behind.

After a short walk downhill, a natural miniature lake, though fishless, invited Lolo to its colorful banks. The lake was surrounded by clumps of wild grasses and small groves of desert acacia in full sun-yellow bloom. Occasionally, an adventurous fennel seed hitched a ride and established a permanent home among the acacias, swaying in the breeze and flavoring the air with licorice. Licorice-spiced fennel is a trickster plant; you either love it or find it intolerable, even grilled with lemon and parsley, Lolo thought. Once in a while, a forlorn cactus was lucky enough to butt in; its sharp, pointy spines making her walk carefully around it.

The lake’s boundaries stretched out or shrank with the seasons. This inconsistency probably annoyed the heck out of the quick-witted mallard ducks Lolo fed with bits of leftover Bundt cake. This time she didn’t bring anything along and felt a little guilty, so she decided to focus on counting the tadpoles swarming near her feet. She imagined the plump, tail-eating tadpoles didn’t hang around long enough to be bothered with the lake getting smaller and smaller, but they supported the ducks’ tirades out of solidarity. Lolo had quite an imagination!

In the distance, Lolo saw large boulders with several human figures lounging on top. Some of the boulders looked like Swiss cheese because of the holes, while the others could’ve passed for ogre kin on a rare moonless night, or so she figured.

After the scarce rains, the canyon walls exploded with carpets of the wild mustard plant, its liquid golden color so vivid it could be seen from space. Though undeniably cheerful, without a good water sprinkling system, the double-crossing mustard plant turned brown quickly, burning during the fire season. Grandmother said the mustard’s master plan was going to seed and spread out to assure its predominance. Lolo sometimes thought the humble plant existed to remind her she too would survive. After all, to be seen from space is quite an achievement for a weed. Could Grandmother’s roses or Grandfather’s orchids be seen by aliens? She suspected not.

Folks who hung around had long accepted the peculiarities of their way of life in the canyon. Some other places had four seasons, but the canyon had only two, both bringing peril. The rainless, wind-fueled season brought on wildfires, while the second one was marked by terrifying mudslides. Lolo remembered that when it did rain, it poured buckets and buckets until the canyon walls could stand no more water. Then, in just a few moments, the debris would come down in a huge thud, wiping out yards and houses as well as ant colonies and snake dens. Even though no one told her, she knew once in a while, that the unstoppable mud flow took lives.

The ancient canyon ended at the mouth of an enormous, shimmering ocean. Deceptively quiet, the ocean delighted in swallowing up a gullible swimmer or two in its deliciously treacherous, cupcake-frosting-white waters. Just like the canyon lake, the sandy beach expanded or shrunk depending on whether it was a fire or a mudslide season. Very few people could live near the beach because the houses were as large as castles, and this is why Lolo’s grandfather and grandmother bought an old musty house in the canyon. Lolo yawned, looked down, and noticed her shoes looking particularly dirty. Oh-oh, she whispered, addressing a large black crow who jumped down from a coastal oak tree, hoping to be fed. I better get home and clean up before I get in trouble again.

2

Back at the house, the contentious pepper tree remembered what the old canyon house had been like for many seasons. It was special, so unlike the others—all color-coordinated and well-ordered. Its faded walls were protected from strange eyes by an overgrown garden. If one could see in, one wouldn’t be too impressed with a view of a malodorous pond, a peeling lion-head fountain, and a large, misshapen pepper tree. Lately, the tree was bedecked with hanging candle-filled lanterns interwoven with metal and wood chimes along with several sets of teeny-tiny multicolored Christmas lights. The lights twinkled, but only during the holidays. The rest of the year, to be fair, they were strictly a nuisance, the pepper tree thought. In the afternoon breeze, accompanied by the swinging chimes, the amber and sapphire bejeweled lanterns crooned with exotic melodies of their longed-for native lands: India, Thailand, possibly Indonesia, but most likely, China.

Pepper was positive the house’s new owners despised travel. The tree heard their opinions often enough. Why bother to drag ourselves across the world, endanger our health, and put up with all the nuisance just to bring home a few overpriced trinkets? We can go to the canyon thrift store and pick anything our heart desires for pennies! No need to waste our money! The tree suspected that the fact the grandparents didn’t even have passports made them seem almost bizarre to their swanky neighbors.

Life in the canyon was unpredictable. Blistering desert winds raced down the old canyon toward the quiet ocean every year. The violent air currents pushed and pulled on tree limbs, stripping the leaves, and injuring all who stood in its path of obliteration. Some trees were torn clear out off the ground. More frightening to the pepper tree, though, were the other arboreal beings. The ones so scorched by the fire embers carried by the winds that they were rendered unrecognizable. Laughing flames adored the exhilaration of both power and speed. Many trees died silently of sheer fright because the howling was too terrible for words.

Several years before the girl Lolo came to live in the canyon house, one of these great windstorms blew the musty yellow house’s pepper tree down; right to the crab grass-infested lawn. Gangly and unsure, it was only a teenage tree, still suffering from growing pains in stoic silence.

Usually, in the mornings after the windstorms would settle down, the big people who lived in the canyon would grieve their lost trees or call in the famous tree doctor to see if something could be done. He was the only one who could honestly tell if a patient would get well with time and hugs or needed to be callously yanked out. (Tree doctors can be sympathetic or merciless; the garden creatures and plants never could tell who’d stay and who had to go.)

As fates would have it, the Lady who worked in the musty yellow house liked pepper trees best. She grew up around them back in her home village. She understood the language of trees, appreciating their gifts. Some trees offered shade, while others could feed you. The bark of a tree could take your pain away or offer a safe home for the birds. Pepper trees told fascinating stories since they lived a very long time unless they were not appreciated. The Lady who worked in the house possessed a knowledgeable and appreciative nature. Although she was mostly invisible to the folks who hired her to work for them, the garden creatures—flowers, the birds, the insects, but most of all the trees, were awfully fond of her.

The canyon house’s pepper tree simply loved her. The Lady was small in body, but big in heart. She may not have had internet skills, but she was blessed with an abundance of natural common sense, which as everyone knows, is not so common. While her weary black eyes slanted downward, the corners of her full ripe lips pointed to the stars. Proud, yet humble, she practiced her favorite salsa dance moves as she did her daily chores. Everywhere she worked there was music.

The pepper tree liked it when the Lady called Dolores Lolita, a name Dolores found even more to her liking than Lolo, since the kids in her old school teased her by rhyming it with Rollo. Lolo told the tree about already feeling out of place because she towered over her classmates. Pepper understood. Who’d like to be called Rollo Lolo?

Lolo also shared with the tree how much she enjoyed sitting at the kitchen table, tasting yummy handmade treats, while listening to the Lady’s stories: some funny, some happy, and some sad. Lolo liked to stuff herself with sweet buñuelos. Homemade buñuelos were especially tasty, even if they didn’t look at all like regular puffy doughnuts. They were flat and shaped like an elephant’s ear. Lolo was free to indulge her sweet tooth while Grandmother was out doing whatever mysterious errands that grownups do to pass the time when they don’t work anymore.

The Lady who worked in the yellow house told Lolo that she was born far away, in the land of the mysterious Warriors of the Sun and La Virgen de Guadalupe, a place called Santa Maria de Arriba. Though enchanting, Santa Maria de Arriba was too small for people to live in nowadays. All the young people left. Only grandparents and a couple of dogs stayed home. Fortunately, no one took notice of my humble village since it wasn’t of great consequence for the bad guys who are running amok in the land of La Virgen, the Lady sighed, explaining.

Why did you leave your home if you liked it there? asked Lolo one day, while the two sat under the pepper tree, pretending to have a picnic. The Lady shook her head and looked down. No matter how much I hated to leave, I had no choice but to move to the canyon by the ocean, she answered. Some folks work their hands to the bone far away from home while others do nothing but complain and nitpick. Pepper admired the Lady who worked in the house. She accepted her fate with grace, for no one could ever call her a nitpicker. Of course, she forgot neither her village nor her favorite pepper tree, covered with rosy berries, nor the boy she loved.

Sadly, the boy left home long before she did and didn’t keep in touch. Just as well…since he, like most of his friends, had lost hope. Refusing to migrate north, he saw no other path but to join the bad guys, the Lady clarified. He did leave her one wondrous gift, a beautiful healthy son she named Miguel Pablo, after his father. The old owners of the musty yellow house were kind, fond of the Lady and her growing boy. And so, she stayed on with the grandparents too, making sure all was safe and sound, including Lolo and her pepper tree friend.

The tree would always recall with gratitude the morning when she almost didn’t make it. TD (short for Tree Doctor) drove to the musty yellow house in his newly repainted shiny blue truck, carrying an odd-looking tree-saving contraption. Together, the Lady who worked in the house, TD, and her teenage son