doubts nearly everything, including his own existence (and mine) so I wasn’t surprised when he took more than a passing interest in local evangelicals. They’d come to the door annually with literature about the end of the world, which they fully expect not to participate in, having been whisked off to heaven in the nick of time.
Reading up on their organization, Hubby immediately began
analyzing its corporate structure. As
he is perennially disgusted by the human habit of making war rather than love, he
decided these folks, despite the exclusive requirements of their doctrine, might
have something positive to offer the rest of us. After all, their legions of door-knocking foot-soldiers aimed only to get him to read their literature, at least as the first
step toward recruiting him. He figured their
heavenly organizational structure might be effective on an earthly scale in ways that do
not involve lethal weapons. He began
composing questions for the interview he planned to conduct the next time they
appeared.
His position as evangelism-researcher represented a
change of heart for Hubby, a confirmed and unabashed skeptic despite his open-mindedness. My own strategy had always been to firmly say
no thank you when being proselytized through a crack in the door, then close the door tight as if the
evangelizers should know better. I must say, though, that I developed a
smidgeon of admiration for their persistence over the years as they dutifully
and without complaint trudged up the 600-foot, uphill gravel driveway in all
kinds of weather, often with children in tow.
The evangelicals took us in stride, returning annually though eventually represented by male proselytizers after Hubby accidentally opened
the door on two of their well-dressed ladies one time in his BVD’s.
For my part, I am more interested in plants and non-human
animals than in people as the most likely agents of world peace, and I am
fascinated by the possibilities self-reliance offers over interdependence. Over the years I have participated in various
experiments in self-sufficiency ranging from keeping a pig or two (grain-fed
and thus enriching the local Agway) to milking a small herd of dairy goats (run down
and killed by feral dogs) to planting Carpathian walnut trees (frozen to death
the first winter) and free-ranging heritage turkeys (feasted upon one night by
a consortium of local racoons). One
summer I planted several rows of high-end potato starts (producing one
basketful of robin’s-egg-sized potatoes) and another
I tried sweet corn (stripped by deer that left the naked ears hanging). Foxes decapitated chickens and
ducks, and skunks brought entire families to picnic at the pile of kitchen
waste composting in the yard. It took a
while, but over time I learned to focus my self-reliance efforts on plants wild
critters don’t like (peonies) or can’t get (carrots).
That’s when I mail-ordered a Meyer lemon tree from a
place on the West Coast that sells fruit trees for indoor-growing. I learned that Meyer lemons can be grown in
containers, and I knew from hunting and gathering at the grocery store that fresh
lemons make really good lemonade, lemon-meringue pie, lemon slices for
tea, and various other Vitamin-C-laced luxuries otherwise unavailable in
northern New Hampshire.
When the tree arrived in its insulated box, I was
surprised at its size. It was a main trunk,
perhaps eighteen inches tall, with various side branches in progress. Its leaves were turgid and leathery, stiff
and shiny, and deep green. There were a
couple of thorns on the main trunk, nothing to be too concerned about. After all, it’s more difficult to harvest a bunch
of rugosa-rose hips, with branches carpeted by needley thorns,
than it is to pick one lemon from a branch that sports one or two big thorns just
for show. I potted my little tree in a
wooden planter and gave it a good dose of compost the skunks had left behind.
Over several years I came to love that lemon tree like an
adopted child. I kept it in a
south-facing window for the winter and summered it outdoors in semi-shade. It produced intoxicating
blossoms that made its corner of the cabin’s great room into a tropical garden
during the long, northern winters. When
it was five feet tall, I set a small chair near the blossoming branches so I
could sit and smell the flowers. When the
tree was in bloom, I inseminated its fragrant blossoms
with a small paintbrush I kept in the planter.
My efforts yielded more than a dozen lemons, and I treasured every
one. I gave some away as gifts and
squeezed most of the rest of them into my tea.
Each winter the tree, stretching for light there wasn’t
enough of, grew taller and lankier,
until in its accustomed corner it became crooked and cramped, like a
basketball player in a kiddy car.
Finally one September, despite my decapitation of its leader-trunk,
it had grown too tall outdoors to winter in its accustomed corner. By then it was too heavy to lift, so its
planter had been fitted with a wheeled palette that allowed me to roll it around.
But that fall no matter where I rolled it, its bent neck scratched
the ceiling. So I
moved it to the upstairs bedroom, where the ceiling reaches all the way to the
roof. There in a corner between two
windows it stretched out in the autumn sun, put out a few blossoms, and hunkered
down for the winter. As the days grew shorter,
I woke each morning to the fragrance of lemon blossoms and the sight of
bright-green leaves in the corner.
Not Hubby. A tall
and ruggedly built fellow living in a cramped cabin, he cherished each square inch of
unoccupied floor space, using the precious
area to do exercises, to deposit the not-dirty-enough-for-laundry
clothing he intended to wear the next day, and to dance his morning
dressing-dance. His routine consisted
of several bendings-over to retrieve dropped clothing, then a sequence of
one-footed pirouettes that aligned each foot with its
corresponding leg holes. He followed
this with a combination move accomplishing the retrieval of socks that somehow
then got unwadded and rolled onto his feet.
There should have been music, but there wasn’t.
There were branches, though, and those branches had
thorns that had grown in number and in size as the tree itself had grown, and they stuck
out in all directions. Even though the
wheeled palette had been rolled compactly into the corner of the bedroom, the
lemon tree reached its thorny branches out like open arms over Hubby’s open
space. Every time he stood up,
he got stabbed, and what then came out of his mouth wasn’t music, though I
suppose it might have been mistaken for religious ecstasy if the circumstances
had been different.
But they weren’t, and so my beloved lemon tree became Hubby’s
enemy. Knowing I loved the thing
unconditionally, he tried to keep his post-inoculation commentary to himself,
but Hubby is short on patience, eloquent in his use of profanity, and highly
sensitive to pain, especially the pain of morning stabbings before he has taken
caffeine. I wore a protective cloak
of denial, figuring to give the tree an extreme topping when I moved it outdoors
the next spring. But in my heart I knew
eventually I would have to choose either Hubby or the lemon tree. I couldn’t keep both.
And so we tolerated our way through the winter, and,
while tolerance may preserve world peace, it isn’t necessarily pleasant. Even though I tried to snip off the thorns as
they appeared, I could not keep up with the evolutionary defenses of the entire
lemon genome. The stabbings continued.
The writing of potential-interview questions continued, too,
as Hubby determinedly researched the evangelicals’ history and world view. He learned that the whole organization is
structured like a Ponzi scheme with a few leaders cranking out literature at
the top of the organization while legions of true believers carry it door to
door in the hopes of spreading Good News about the coming apocalypse. They do this in addition to supporting their
local congregations in a variety of ways, from donating professional services to
tithing. Clearly something was going on,
and Hubby wanted to know what and how it could be.
So when a tweed-suited proselytizer appeared at the door the
next spring, Hubby not only accepted the literature he was offered, he also
made an appointment to conduct his interview and learn more about how the
organization's hierarchy operated. He was especially
interested in how the people at the top of the organization managed to maintain themselves,
presumably in cabins larger and more comfortable than ours.
After a winter of painful tolerance, tinged with nostalgia over the unavoidable surrender of my beloved tree, I had grown short on
patience. Even though I kind of admired
Hubby for taking on the evangelical organization, I also felt sorry for the
poor proselytizer planning to save Hubby's soul. Little did he know he would soon be called
upon to defend his entire belief system against Hubby’s scientific methods and
data-gathering techniques. I acknowledged Hubby’s
right to invite other civilized humans into our home, but I was determined to
be absent for the psychological cataclysm I felt sure would follow this visit. I arranged to go grocery shopping at the
appointed time.
When I returned from the store two hours later, I found Hubby sitting alone at the table with his legal padful of questions. The proselytizer had blown off the appointment. I was both relieved and secretly smug,
figuring this would teach Hubby something about world peace. Then the phone rang. It was the proselytizer, apologizing for missing
his appointment and aiming to set up another.
He wanted to share the presumed conversion of Hubby with one of his evangelical
pals. Hubby agreed to the change and set
a time.
At that point my tolerance morphed to insanity. I had agreed to the interview of one
evangelical, not two, and this new arrangement convinced me they were
multiplying geometrically, like bacteria.
Hubby accused me of bigotry, and I accused him of premeditated
mind-messing. I told him the
evangelicals were ganging up, and he told me he could handle them. Finally, in an attempt to have the last word,
I told him there were enough crazies already in our small cabin, and it could
accommodate no more. Then I claimed my right
to defend my turf against the poison of dangerous ideas. This smacked of censorship, which in theory
both Hubby and I deplore, so it seemed we had reached an impasse.
Then I remembered the lemon tree.
A compromise was proffered. In exchange for his canceling his
evangelicals, I would give away my tree.
Caught offguard by the proposal, Hubby fingered his most recent stab-wounds, then
picked up the phone and cancelled the interview. Perhaps as a show of good faith, he also told
the evangelicals not to call on us again.
In exchange, I immediately
phoned my sister-in-law, who had always admired my lemons and who came the next
day with her pickup truck to move the tree to the solarium of a friend of hers,
where, I assume, it lives happily ever after.
As the tree rolled away in the back of the truck, I
thanked Hubby for his cooperation and good will. I added I was particularly pleased there’d be
no more solicitous visits from people determined to convince us not to think
for ourselves. It was then that Hubby
explained that the evangelical no-call list is good for only two years, after
which we will likely be visited again.
I am currently perusing mail-order catalogs for another Meyer
lemon tree, in case.
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