I got a deal on the house. The biddy’s daughter, niece, whatever, was desperate to get rid of it. I don’t think she got along with the biddy. For me it was about moving to a weed friendly state. Oregon fit the bill. The capital seemed like a fine place. Outside the downtown there was room for a little property, back yard. I could grow outdoors without having to hang in Stuart’s yard, all the time. That four plant limit is a joke. They don’t enforce it so maybe someone that matters is in on it, long as you’re not selling to the public… well at all really.
I asked about the neighbors, but she kept interrupting her sentences with “Anyways” and “as I was saying” and then she would completely change the subject. Always something other than the neighbors.
She got a look when I said I was going to grow pot in the yard. Smile maybe, but her eyes got wide and her skin thinned for a second. Red flush. It’s legal, still, some people still have a problem. Wondered if people speak freely about it here. It was an odd moment.
She made a nervous laugh. She was holding something back. “Won’t be an issue,” she said.
She finally got around to telling me about the Nuns. She didn’t call them that. Their names are Agnes and Silvia and I’ve come to I think of them as “the Nuns.” They have houses on either side of the one I bought. Both drive old 1970s Plymouths. “Drive” is generous. Silvia, the Right Nun’s is parked on her lawn. It’s mustard, and growing rustily brown. It has three flat tires. Left Nun, Agnis’ car is better maintained. Parked on concrete. It has a cover but the biddy’s daughter said it was a brown Duster. Presumably not the brown that Silvia’s is cultivating.
She said Silvia never comes out of the house but the day I moved in I got first peak at her. My girlfriend at the time was helping me unload the truck. We had been dating long distance on and off. She lived, probably still lives, in Portland and was part of my consideration around the move. A part that didn’t work out.
We opened the pickup gate and seconds later Agnes door banged against the rail. She tromped down her stone stairs in a bathrobe and gardening shoes. Planted herself at the edge of her driveway and peered around the stone wall of her garage. Reverse vampire, I thought. Can’t leave her own driveway without an invitation.
“May I visit with your Mother?” she asked. I was carrying my surviving smuggled mother plant into the garage. I was surprised she knew the term, I’ve never lived in a legal state before. Maybe everyone is conversant.
“Sure. It’s a haze.”
“You grew her from seed.” It wasn’t a question. You can tell if a pot plant was started from seed. Early branches are paired. Later, the mature branches are alternate and clones almost always grow in with staggered branches. She is three years old. Usually pot plants die after the harvest but if you’re careful and know just a tiny bit about what you’re doing you can get them to reveg, stop blooming, and continue life as if winter had never come.
“Does she have a name.”
“No,” I lied. I fight a constant battle to avoid anthropomorphizing my plants. It helps when you need to throw them on the compost heap. Her name is Eve but I kept it to myself. Agnes was staring at the plant with her mouth moving. No sound, maybe her dentures were bothering her. Anyway, after a half a minute and my arms getting tired the other nun Sylvia pops out onto her porch and joins the plant staring welcome ceremony.
Grace, that’s my girlfrend, ex., was using the bathroom and she comes out in the middle of this strange triangle. The two nuns turn to her and she starts acting like a plant herself. I would have expected her to launch into some “Are you fucking staring at me!” tirade but in that moment, and for the rest of the move she was oddly silent. She broke up with me a couple days later. Or maybe that day. I figured it out when she didn’t answer my texts.
A couple days after the move Agnes, the left Nun, rings my doorbell. She is wearing a different robe but is still in the green rubber shoes.
“May I visit with your Mother?” Where I come from you don’t even tell people that you’re growing pot. It invites thieves and cops. You try not to mix with the neighbors too much and you come up with stories why your apartment smells you have a pet skunk. Gonna be different here.
I led her around back, not through the house, what I’m growing inside is nobody’s business. We went into the yard and I got nervous. I had forgotten the seedling. It was sitting between next to Eve, it’s cotyledon leaves were open and true leaves were just poking out. I’m excited to be growing it. Demon G13. It’s bagseed from my growmie Stuart. I held it for a year. I brought the seedling outside to harden it to the sun and wind. I wanted to get a sense of wether it might prefer the outdoors. Seemed to. Lots of growers will tell you not to bring plants back indoors but the table is clean and there’s nothing super critical going on in the tent so I’m not too worried.
Agnes stood in front of it and went into her staring, mumbling thing again. She stepped away from the seedling and gestured me to join her. “Do you know what this is?” she whispered.
“Just some bagseed,” I told her. She doesn’t need to know that it came from some of the trippiest herb I’ve smoked in a 25 year career as a pothead. I got it from Stuart. Stuart likes to think of himself as a breeder but he’s a pollen chucker just like me. We’re not really friends but you need people who will taste your stuff. I qualified for him. Normally, he was supremely generous with his seeds. Most of the time he shared herb like Robbin’ Hood, seeds and flower both. The Demon blew my mind. At least the way Stuart grew it. Locked me to my couch and when I finally mustered the will to drag myself off to bed the dreams kept the trip going. Good night sleep though, and no morning headache. I practically begged him for the seeds but he wasn’t sharing these. Said they were a university project, a group thing and they didn’t want the F2s breeding if they didn’t have a particular phenotype. He said maybe he would share the F3s but I was moving and didn’t have time to wait around. I copped a bud when he went out of the room and it turned out to have a single spotted seed in it. Probably meant it had herm tendencies… Unless he had intentionally pollinated it. Whatever.
“Bag seed” she said, as if I was lying. You can’t tell anything from a sprout this size. She couldn’t have known. “You don’t know what this is,” she said.
“I will offer you a protection,” she said. Her visit with the mothers was over. She turned around and let herself out through a gate in our yard’s fences. It had been beside some bushes. First time I noticed it.
Part 2
She rang my door again an hour later with a baby food jar. Inside were three seeds. “Plant these three around the Demon.” She turned around and left. I hadn’t told her it was a G13 Demon.
There is a four plant per household limit in Oregon. Until I get my med card I am theoretically bound to that. I say theoretically because they do make distinctions between mature plants and sprouts. I could grow a number of sprouts and pick the best performers but as they grow tall the legality becomes questionable. I can’t just grow random seeds out. At minimum I wanted to know the lineage on them.
I gathered up a vial of haze seeds my mother donated last year. Nevil’s Haze, is a lovely strain that most anyone would be pleased to have in their tool bag. I made my way up her stone stairs and, not finding a doorbell I clapped the bat wing door knocker three times and waited.
“May I visit your Mothers?” I said when the door opened. She used the phrase twice with me. Maybe it was a secret handshake. She opened the door and led me through a deep wood paneled hallway. A straigt line to her yard door. The porch stairs continued the line down and handed off to a stone garden path which passed between two ash trees. On the far side of the trees I saw her remarkable mother.
It was a single plant. Its trunk, fat and gnarly, rose from from an elevated pile of straw. Presumably a mound of dirt was underneath. Its branches spread as wide as five of my plants and looked strong. All nine were trained and each branched again. I couldn’t count but above the bottom third it became bushy and symmetrical. Each of the second set of branches had a colored ribbon hanging from it and the ribbons held small sacks. It was like a miniature Christmas Tree Bonsai. It took a minute to sink in. The second set of branches were all grafts. She had like 81 different strains all grafted to one Mother who seemed decades old. I began to speak but her look shut me up. She turned toward the house again. I was meant to follow.
“That’s amazing!” I said, “How old is that plant.”
“Lilith was given to me when I turned fifty.” I had no idea how old she was and didn’t see a polite way of asking. She seemed at least seventy which would make that plant four times as old as the oldest mother I’d seen. Like I said. Pot plants are supposed to die at the end of the season. Keeping them alive after that is a bit of a trick. Grafting to them was another trick. Entirely different and equally challenging.
I stopped at the yard entryway. Just inside by the hallway. There was an old type case hung on the wall. It was full of little boxes, bags and jars. Under each was a bit of illegible script on a tag. “I brought you a gift” I said, producing her baby food jar filled with Neville’s Haze. She took it, sniffed the jar, and pulling a tissue from a built-in in the hallway she tapped out two seeds. Through the tissue she gave them a slight squeeze. She handed me the jar back.
“I will only need two.” Bullshit, I thought. With two seeds you barely have a chance to find a male and a female.
“They’re Neville’s Haze, Greenhouse Seeds.”
“They have an older name,” she said, wiggling her finger in the air.
I had a dream about that type case. Each box was filled with seeds. Old seeds, like really old. Maybe from before prohibition. Maybe older. The runes on the labels were the names of strains. Stuff I hadn’t seen in my lifetime. Stuff the old dudes talk about: Colombian Gold, Panama Red, Acapulco Gold, Thai Stick, stuff from before Skunk and Haze got into everything. Boys would dig deep into their wallets to touch those beans. Sometimes dreams give me ideas.
Well, I gave an honest try growing a couple of her guardian seeds. It sexed out male and I don’t have the space to keep separate outdoor grows. A male, if you let it drop pollen will turn an entire grow into an unsmokable seed collection. I wasn’t about to do that with a random. I chucked it on the compost heap. Let it grow from there if it wants to.
The other was a female. A pretty one at that. It had a mutation. Normally, like I said, there are two shoots coming out of every node in a plant grown from seed. This one had three. I call it Three Fingers, even though that feels like a guy name. Assuming she stacks well that’s a third more buds for me to smoke. I’m not complaining.
The day after I chopped the male up I had to make a run to the far side of town. I don’t know why Home DePot, that’s what growmies call Home Depot, I don’t know why they can’t just put up a place downtown. It’d be way more convenient. Instead I gotta drive thirty minutes in the wrong direction. I was pulling off the highway when damned if I didn’t see a brown Plymouth Duster parked by the new construction. It was a surprise. Left Nun Agnes car doesn’t leave her house ever. There can’t be more than one shit-brown antique Duster in this town. This was an opportunity. I turned around and headed back to the house.
The gate connecting our yards has an old style lock built into it. There’s one just like it on the opposite side. The biddy who lived here before me must have been friendly with her neighbors. It looked rusted buy I had seen Sylvia use it. I don’t get much opportunity to use my picks anymore. There was a time though. Only took me thirty seconds to pick it open. I came out in her yard behind the hundred armed mother and went up to the deck. There it was, through the glass. I was sure my dream was on the money. I tried the door and fuck me if it wasn’t open. I went in and took a quick picture of the wood frame, just in case I screwed up and forgot where I pulled something. I had brought a pill box and I started through the compartments, opening the boxes, bottles and bags in the type case one by one taking a couple of seeds if there were more than ten. Didn’t want the Nun to miss anything. I kept a record with the camera. If I’m going to be growing this stuff out I don’t want to get confused.
I did grow it out. Inside. Some herb smells are very distinct and I didn’t want to advertise to the Nun that I’d been playing in her crib. I had a small inside space well suited for growing out seedlings. Took me three tries to get one to pop but then it grew with promise. Stem rub was all dank fuel. The plan was to get new lights and then flip the little ones. Flip is what you call it when you fake a cannabis plant into thinking winter has come. You change up the lighting on them. That was the plan. Didn’t work out that way. The little one didn’t stay little for long enough.
The plant got big. Long thin leaves. Pretty typical for a sativa. Way too big for my space. I tried to top it but it ignored me and grew right up into the lights which were already as close to the ceiling as the heat sinks would let me get. It was stretching out in every direction.
Took me almost half an hour to lug the 10 gallon pot up from the basement. Not sure what I was thinking. Get it outside before it was too big to move maybe. It was out on my back porch before I realized that wasn’t going to fly. The smell, which in the house among the carbon filters, seemed manageable, spread out like a hazardous waste spill over the whole block. I said fuck it and got out my heavy trimmers and a box of lawn waste bags. It was too soon to smoke it. Pot needs time to mature before it does anything good for your head. Too soon and it’s all racy and paranoid making.
You can’t get high from touching pot. It doesn’t work that way. The cannabinoids need to decarboxilate to get you to THC. That happens when it’s heated. I hadn’t smoked anything which is unusual during a trim job but this wasn’t meant to be a trim though. It was meant to be me cutting an unruly ass plant into disposable sections. Somehow At dusk I found myself sitting on my porch with a bin of neatly trimmed weed in front of me. My hands were covered in thick resin. The bag in front of me was empty. I came out of my haze with a jerk like someone was watching me. I turned my head left and right trying to look casual. No sign of the Nuns on either side. I brought the tub full of buds into the house and took the garbage bag full of second trim out to the green bin in front. Truck would come for it on Wednesday.
The brown biddy mobile wasn’t there. Not sure why but that gave me a bad feeling. It shouldn’t have because that meant she wasn’t around to smell the plant but you can’t argue with feelings.
Speaking of feelings. that was the first time I noticed the tingling in my chest. It felt like an inflammation. I didn’t recall ever having that sensation. It made me think of boobs. Not my boobs. Guys don’t really have boobs. Female boobs, like what it must feel like when boobs first start to fill out.
It took three passes with isopropyl alcohol to get my hands unsticky enough to do my Halloween shopping.
When I got home with the candy and a couple of plastic pumpkins to put out front the Duster was back in its place looking like it had never moved. I went out to check on Eve, Three Fingers and the little guardian. I had been so preoccupied with the monster in the basement the last three days that I hadn’t looked at her since yesterday. The guardian plant was dead. Not dying. Dead. Eve was holding on but looked like she had the same thing the guardian had. Leaves were curled toward the stem like one of those birthday blowout. Never saw that before. Usually a plant will give you some notice but every last drop of green had been emptied out of it. Three Fingers seemed fine. Green as ever, with the last October flush of flower. I was about to go inside when I noticed a blip of yellow near her base. I looked again. Not just one blip. There were little yellow combs. Three, four, five fingered popping out from all around the lower third of the plant. Demon G13 had hermed. Usually it takes some sort of stress to make a female cannabis plant express hermaphroditic traits. I wondered if whatever killed the guardian and was killing Eve had had a herming effect on Three Fingers.
The females in the basement had been crowded out by the monster . The Guardian was dead. Eve was on her way out. Looked like I would be smoking herm and hitting dispensaries for the winter. It occurred to me that a herm in my yard might not be neighborly given Left Nun had a grows of her own, if it was showing that many nanners, that’s short for bananas, its what the growmies call these male pollen producing anomalies. If it was showing this many, odds were good it was already dropping pollen. That stuff is strong. Even worse than a male. Growers don’t like Hermaphrodites as they often happen by surprise. If you’re messing with herm genetics you have to be constantly vigilant or you could wind up loosing every crop in your field. Not to mention your neighbors. I took out my magnifier and checked the trichomes. Most of them were still clear. Late bloomer this girl. I figured I would pluck the nanners and cross my fingers. Maybe two more weeks.
Part 3
I went inside and took off my gloves. That glue from the monster, or maybe all the alcohol had done something nasty to my hands. They were blotched and pale. Like the blood had been drained from them. I rubbed them together. They didn’t feel familiar. Thin and cold. The odd feeling in my chest made itself known again. An itch this time. I felt the skin on my chest. It felt loose, as if I had been loosing weight.
I smoked a joint from my dwindling stash jar and ate four of the little candy bars I had purchased for the trick or treaters. Went to bed early.
I woke up before dawn, didn’t feel right, dizzy and weak. Weak wasn’t quite right, I felt frail. Like if I bumped into the ottoman in the living room I would break a toe or fall. Spent most of the morning in bed. Don’t remember what I did. When I checked the mail in the afternoon I saw kids running house to house across the street. None had visited my place though. I had forgotten to put out the pumpkins. In my old hood nobody cared if your house was decorated or not but here it seems the norm that you don’t go begging at houses that don’t invite you. I put the plastic buckets out and noticed again that the Duster was missing. Ladies were getting downright social. I decided that instead of putting the monster out with the trash I would burn it in the yard. I would need a fire pit and that meant a trip back to the dePot.
Folks at Home Depot were going about their business dressed as people shopping. Not many costumes at all. I got a big metal bowl with a stand and a wire screen. That would be a good thing to have for seasons to come. I was pulling out toward the highway when I spotted the brown Plymouth again. Parked in the same place by the new construction. I pulled into a bank lot and watched for the nuns. It didn’t take long. The two of them came doddering along up the block from the new construction carrying big canvas sacks. Each looked big enough for two biddies but they were managing. Agnes opened the back door and pushed her sack in. Then she helped Silvia in next to it. She put Silvia’s sack in the front seat. They drove away.
I went back the way they’d come. Around the corner there was a storefront with a sign with familiar lettering. It was a strange feeling not to be able to read a sign in my own country. I stared at it for a few minutes until magically the letters came to make sense.
It said “Excellent Hexsellers”. It was one of those Halloween supply stores that pop up every year for a couple weeks before the day to sell costumes and lawn ornaments. I parked and went to the door figuring I could use a skeleton or some such. There was a sign “Familiars and unfamilars in stock” in the window. The knob was locked. 3:45 in the afternoon. Who locks a Halloween Store in the middle of Halloween day. I tugged again to see if I could get the attention of the clerk but I couldn’t see anyone inside.
The familiar lettering of the sign was the same as the lettering on the Left Nun’s seed rack. I took out my phone and inspected the photos I had taken. Sure enough, the labels were now comprehensible, “Basement Monster, Hermes x Aphrodite, Romulan, Can o’ hops, Park Davis indica, American Cannabis, Escalating Skunk, Oaxacan Spear, Ruderalis” at least the last made sense.
I drove home. It took me almost fifteen minutes to get up my stairs. Never had trouble with my knees before.
I phased out again and woke in a cooling bath tub. Smelly water. There was an empty bag on the bathroom floor and flowers were floating around me. Grace had left patchouli potpourri back when I had a hot tub. Something had possessed me to dump it in the bath and I was now smelling like a homeless hippie. The ring of the first trick-or-treaters took me by surprise. I could hear them chattering with each other as I pulled on a robe and headed to the candy basket. Suddenly there was a loud scratching from the yard. The sound carried from the deck through the roof supports and into the back walls of the house. I have squirrels in the attic but this wasn’t them, something bigger. I was about to open the front door when all hell broke loose. Animal screams. I could tell it was a life and death struggle back there. I left the kids to wonder on the porch and hurried to the back. Sadly I was too late for the excitement. When I peeked out whatever it was was all over. When I went back to the front the kids were gone. They were the only ones too. I wound up eating all the candy myself.
If you’ve ever seen a field after a cottonwood lets loose the view of my back porch would be familiar. There was no blood but a certain white animal had gotten a severe haircut on my deck. Not just on my deck but all over my yard. Every branch of the hermed Demon G13 was draped with white hair. I tried to pluck some off but it was futile. I would never be able to pull it from the sticky buds. I should have harvested it the day before when it showed the nanners. Now it was too late. Useless. I was going to be buying crap, ounces at a time, from discount dispensaries for the foreseeable future. I stumbled uselessly around the yard for a few minutes. The gates on both sides were open. Whatever animals had been fighting they must have come in through the gates. Through the locked gates. I closed them.
I set up the fire pit and emptied the basement monster into it bit by bit. I tore down the Three Fingered herm and added it on. A sprinkle of Eve, a pinch of the Guardian. They were all green. Grassy smoke. Slow to burn, but eventually the pit got hot enough to catch the branches I placed so gingerly atop the pile. One by one. I took a breath in and began hacking. My body felt like it was going to shake apart, shake together. It gets like that if you’ve been away too long. I didn’t want to hurry him off but my sisters were waiting. Dizziness next for me. I do believe that was when the young man’s Ka was transferred to Lilith. I set my tired bottom down on one of his comfy lawn chairs and found my way back. All the way back. The smoke surrounded my chair, surprisingly comforting for these old eyes. Lovely smell. Brought back the memories. The delightful plume was rising into the air now. I looked to the sister yards where matching smoke rose, left and right. That too was familiar. I took deep breaths and felt my skin. Too bad I had to loose all that nice muscle. Too bad about the knees too. Price to pay I suppose. Almost done. I lifted myself up and threw a bit more of the Demon on. That would be just the thing.
