Read Online Mister Owita's Guide to Gardening: How I Learned the Unexpected Joy of a Green Thumb and an Open Heart by Carol Wall - Free Book Online Page B

reply, and I wondered if he’d heard me. Just as I was about to repeat myself, the pages of my landscaping book were ravaged by the wind. My fingers grasped the cover tightly so it wouldn’t be blown away. The sheets whipped forward in quick succession, right to left, as if a nervous ghost were turning them. To gain control, I held the volume to my chest and planted my feet more firmly. Then my gaze fell again to the extra pair of garden gloves, whose lifeless fingers curved suggestively as if, like me, they’d heard a rumor of some unnamed task ahead and wanted to be prepared.
    Giles’s own gloves were a chestnut brown. He had produced them from the pocket of his navy work suit just before he leaped into the tree. Now, as I stood watching, one of Giles’s gloves somersaulted past lime-green leaves with silver undersides that seemed alive. The glove tumbled quickly past the slender branches with their scrolling, vanilla-colored bark and the tawny, paper-like curls along the triple trunk. It landed among the blades of grass where our children used to have their summer picnics. I rushed to pick it up.
    “Please stand back,” Giles said, his voice unusually firm. I closed my garden book with a resonant snapping sound and scurried across the grass to the basketball court, where my metal lawn chair waited. Rhudy, too, backed off, as if he understood the warning. I heard more sawing, and the first branch landed some twelve or fifteen feet away from where I sat. It was about the length of a golf club, but thicker in diameter, with a smaller branch and fluttering leaves attached to make a lopsided V.
    “Rhudy, can you see the sky?” Giles inquired, clearly pleased.
    A triangle of bright blue showed through the airy space that Giles had just created. The lime-green splendor of the leaves was even more pronounced against the turquoise of the cloudless sky.
    “That’s absolutely beautiful,” I said.
    “Now this lovely tree can breathe,” Giles said, with obvious pleasure.
    “That goes for all of us.” Only in that moment did I realize how coiled and ready I’d been for disaster, how truly uncertain I had been that Giles knew what he was doing and wouldn’t come tumbling out of that tree like his work glove. I heard Giles sawing again, and another branch of similar size to the first rattled down. It cut a second elegant swath of blue near the top of the birch.
    Then an answer came to me regarding the mystery of the dark green gloves. Giles probably wanted me to join him in picking up debris afterward. Relieved that no digging would be involved, I scooped a few small twigs from the ground and started a pile. A short while later, Giles landed on his feet with expert poise. I retreated to the kitchen to get him a bottle of water from the fridge. From this higher vantage point I gained a full perspective on the transformation of my tree. Where once there was merely a short white triple trunk with a shapeless expanse of green on top, I now saw leaves and branches; limbs that reached for the sky. A blue jay perching on one of the higher branches greeted me with his shiny eyes. A pair of crimsoncardinals swooped in just below, as if to say, “Where have you been?” Giles’s masterful pruning also yielded clearer glimpses of sunlight dancing on the churning creek. Against the backdrop of these improvements, I was surprised to notice Giles making quick work of the clean-up job that I thought was going to be mine. At the rate he was going, he’d be finished picking up debris and clearing the space before I could get out there. Dick had always chastised me for delaying workers around the house, keeping them talking when they were on the clock. It suddenly occurred to me that Giles was probably in a hurry and had a schedule to keep—visits to other yards, or maybe his shift at the grocery store. Not for the first time, it struck me how exhausted he must be. I grabbed my checkbook and headed out to the yard with the bottle of