Oak Patrol

When you were ten, you and your mother moved to a rented house in Hope Ranch. It came with a small, dilapidated orchard. Your mother said the orchard hadn’t been cared for by previous tenants, but she was too busy to prune the trees or to water them regularly. It was almost your birthday, and she adopted a small rescue dog to be your companion.

Jamie was a cute, itchy terrier with smells that made your mother more exhausted after a long day at work. You never saw him as naughty, only nervous. He liked to dig holes in the yard and bark in the middle of the night. When he started peeing on the hardwood floor, she’d rub his nose in his own embarrassment. “Very bad dog, this isn’t our house,” she’d yell. “You are not allowed to ruin this floor!”

Instead of sitting around the house on weekends, smelling her cigarette smoke and worrying about more dog accidents, you gathered a half-dozen of the bruised, shriveled oranges in a plastic bag and climbed to a sturdy branch of the backyard oak tree. Your self-appointed job was to sample the juice of the oranges and to scout for enemies. Your mother called the neighbors "the rich Republicans," and the sound of that worried you too. “Nixonites,” she’d say, shaking her head, pouring herself a glass of Chablis. “I can smell them from here.”

To protect your mother from the Nixonites, you’d spy on them to see if they were making a bomb that could blow up the neighborhood. From high up, you could see almost half of their garden. It was landscaped with sturdy-looking lawn chairs and tables. No gopher holes or dog poop or fatted flies like at yours. You were convinced that they were plotting something but could only catch a glimpse of their Mexican gardener, walking one way and the other with a fancy lawn mower.

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While waiting for something exciting to happen, you sampled the moldy oranges, wondering why a piece of fruit might not develop naturally. You thought about how anything could suddenly go bad, like an anxious dog. That year, it started to feel like your personal mission: If you looked hard enough, you might just find a survivor.

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