Watermelon Summer

by Anna Hess

  I handed over the paper that had been waiting, folded, in my hip pocket, and seconds later Jacob started to laugh uncontrollably. "Hippie Holler," he finally gasped out when the chortles subsided. "You're trying to get to the hippie farm!"

  It turns out that Jacob's mamaw might have been dubious about inviting me to supper if she'd known my final destination (which was no problem because I wasn't planning on dining with complete strangers anyway). You see, Greensun had a bit of a bad reputation among the wider community, and parents warned their offspring away from what was commonly referred to as "Hippie Holler."

  "Which just means we wanted to go there even more," Jacob explained after his laughter died down. "There's not much to do way out in the country like that, so after you spend some time at the Ghost Lady's house waiting for a sighting, then knock down a few mailboxes, Hippie Holler is the next stop." He looked at me out of the corner of his eye and backpedaled. "Not that I knocked down any mailboxes," he muttered. "Usually, I was the one driving...."

  "So that means you know where Greensun is, right?" I asked, that being my primary concern since the day was already starting to dim. "Will we get there before dark?"

  "Actually, we're almost there," Jacob replied. "Which is a good thing because you don't want to be walking down the hill to the house at night if you aren't familiar with the lay of the land. You do know I can't drive you to the door, right? This place gives a whole new meaning to the word 'remote'."

  Since Jacob had warned me several minutes before to call my mom before cell-phone reception disappeared ("In case your mother is overprotective like my grandmother is," he added), but he hadn't mentioned the r-word then, I figured his definition of "remote" must be pretty extreme. I wasn't ready to throw in the towel, though. "That's okay," I reassured him (or maybe myself). "I'm ready for anything."

  "You know, you could stay at my mamaw's place tonight and go to Greensun tomorrow if you want," Jacob said after a pause. "I didn't really mean it about her not inviting you to dinner because of the hippie thing. She'd probably wring my neck if she knew I dropped you off there alone at this time of day, and we live just down the road."

  Ah, so there was a bit of mountain man in Jacob after all. Instead of being creepy the way Mom had portrayed it, though, at the moment the trait struck me as sweet...and tempting.

  Still, I wanted an adventure, right? And what's an adventure without a little uncertainty and danger?

  "Well, we're here," Jacob said, motioning for me to pull into a hayfield with no structures in sight. "There's a path over there." He pointed toward the trees at the edge of the field. "And about half a mile down is the house. So what do you think? Now or later?"

  "Now," I replied, hauling my huge backpack out of the car, then waving Jacob out of sight. As his taillights disappeared in the distance, I realized I was completely alone with no company except the the quiet sounds of birds settling in for the night.

  The trail was really an eroded and rutted road, quite easy to follow even by flashlight as long as I minded my feet. Together, the ruts and I wound down the road, under trees that I could just make out against the darkening sky above me. I felt encircled and protected by the forest...and then I stepped out past the edge of the trees and looked down into paradise.

  The farmhouse was still clearly visible in the gloom, a white clapboard building that gleamed in the approaching night. The hill I walked down ended with a broad creek, currently invisible but singing to me gently. And then there was the welcoming party.

  At first, all I noticed was a sprinkle of lightning bug flashes here and there in the valley, beautiful enough to someone raised primarily in the suburbs who had seldom seen their glow. But that was just the cacophonous-tuning phase of the visual symphony. Within minutes, every lightning bug went dark...then they flashed all at once in a blinding show of welcome. Above, the Milky Way shone back with a more steady, but equally soul-wrenching light. For the record, this was the moment when I fell in love with Greensun.

  I'm not so sure I believe in love at first sight, but the truth of the matter is that Greensun had been an odd kind of pen pal for most of my childhood. The pump of my affection was primed by years of stories my mother told about her Greensun days, stories in which every character was larger than life. Take Kat, for instance—a girl who lived at Greensun at the same time my mother did, who was a frequent character in Mom's tales, and who (at least when I was five or six) I wished with all my heart I could be.

  "Kat was stout," Mom liked to begin her stories. In Appalachianese, "stout" meant strong and intrepid, and I always had a mixed reaction on the rare occasions when Mom dubbed me with that adjective. What teenage girl, worried she's not as slender as the actresses on TV, wants to be called stout? And yet, the way Mom said the word made me feel proud and embarrassed at the same time.

  But back to the Stout-Kat tale. As my mother would tell the story, this second-grade-age (but homeschooled, of course) member of the Greensun community was Mom's frequent co-conspirator on the farm. One summer afternoon, the rest of the community was at the top of the hill haying, but Mom had stayed home, resting her pregnant belly between bouts of canning huge, steamy loads of applesauce. Kat was helping by eating cut apples nearly as quickly as they left my mother's knife. Between apple morsels, Mom's charge happened to glance out the screen door...and saw Ornery in the corn patch.

  No cow was ever better named. Ornery had been purchased by the community as a milk cow, but nary a soul actually knew how to extract milk from an animal. The low price they'd paid for the cow should have tipped off the would-be milkers that there was something unusual about her behavior, but they figured they'd shower their new cow with kindness and reap the creamy rewards. To cut a long story short, Ornery ended up keeping her milk for her calves (who were at least able to be sold for an annual dose of hard cash), and my mom continued buying milk at the grocery store.

  Unfortunately, Ornery wasn't just ornery about her milk production. She also had a bad tendency to break through fences and eat up the vegetable garden...just like she was doing three weeks before my zeroth birthday. Luckily, Mom had Kat to help her, and Kat was stout.

  If you've only seen idyllic pictures of cattle happily grazing through tall meadow grasses, you probably have no idea how big and scary a cow can be. My mother liked to tell me that Ornery's feet were as large as dinner plates and that she could take off a child's fingertip if you tried to feed her the wrong way, with your hand curled up instead of down. While I now suspect that Mom was exaggerating, I remember looking down at my own feet and knowing that Kat could have been crushed by that monstrous cow. Nevertheless, Mom needed help if she was going to get Ornery out of the corn patch and into the barn, and Kat was game.

  "We closed up the back door of the barn, opened up the front door, and then Kat and I herded her in," Mom told me over and over. (Not that I minded—this was one of my favorite Stout-Kat stories.) "At first, hooting and hollering was enough to get Ornery moving in the right direction, but at the door of the barn, that dratted cow balked. I walked around the front to grab her halter, but our cow was ten times as strong as I was, and no way could I pull her in.

  "So I told Kat to march right up behind Ornery and twist her tail, and that brave girl did just like I asked. One minute, Ornery was rooted on the doorstep...the next, she was running into the barn and we were slamming the door behind her."

  Mom put her hand on her now-flat stomach as she ended the story, and the five-year-old me plucked a piece of cut apple out of the bowl Mom was holding in her lap. "Kat was stout!" we exclaimed together, ending the tale just as it had begun.

  Mom's story was over, but mine was just beginning. As I looked out our kitchen window at tame suburbia, I remember wondering how I could get to be as stout as Kat when the scariest thing in our neighborhood was a friendly but overbearing St. Bernard.

  While I'd like to say I was as stout as Kat, the truth is that a few minutes after falling in love with Greensun, I nearly fell in
the creek. I hadn't been able to resist lingering and watching the synchronous lightning bugs, so by the time I reached the watery moat in front of the house, the night was fully dark. There seemed to be stepping stones in the water, but when I gingerly placed my foot on the first one, the algal slime slid me right off again. Fifty pounds of gear on my back made me top-heavy, and there was quite a bit of cartoonish arm-waving before I managed to leap back to the shore. In the end, I took off my boots and waded across the water (remarkably cold for June), then timidly walked barefoot up to the large dog standing in front of the house.

  "Lucy does not bite," read the homemade tag around her neck, as I discovered after warily skirting the dog, stumbling into the house and finding a light switch on the wall by the door. While I appreciated the sentiment of letting me know Greensun's current full-time resident's name and personality, the irony wasn't lost on me—who was likely to be able to read the tag unless they'd already made friends with the dog? At which point, of course, the biting issue was null and void.

  Luckily, making friends with Lucy was no problem. After a solid night's rest in my sleeping bag, unrolled atop the couch right inside the door, Lucy and I set out to explore the farm. And what we found was notes. Lots and lots of notes.

  "Hens like to lay in straw hat on porch," one note read, then went on to include information on where omelet-friendly herbs were growing. Sure enough, I found an egg just where the note had predicted, and even though the shell was green, the contents jump-started my jet-lagged appetite.

  "One scoop of sawdust down the hole after each use," chided the scrap of paper tucked behind the mouse-gnawed toilet-paper roll in the outhouse. I hadn't noticed amid the cobwebs, but there was indeed a bucket of sawdust inside the little wooden room, with a quart-sized plastic container stuck inside for a scoop. And after deciding the view of the creek, while beautiful, would also give anyone walking onto the farm a view of me with my pants down, I closed the door and found a much longer note about composting-toilet ecology tacked to the inside.

  Newly educated on composting toilets and why they were vastly superior to outhouses (sorry about the improper terminology earlier), I stopped by the log barn on my way back to the house. There, I learned that peacocks roosted in the rafters, hens lower down, and that I was expected to feed both. Back in the house, I was informed that "Flo the cat eats dry food" and that everything in the kitchen was there for my use. The note-writer, while odd, appeared to have my best interests at heart, having provided most of the basic non-perishables I would need for my pre-meeting month.

  I wandered up the rickety stairs, ducking my head so I wouldn't hit it on the slanted ceiling as I entered the upper level. An ancient set of encyclopedias and National Geographics lined the walls, along with hundreds of dusty books with topics ranging from cooking and gardening to poetry and fiction. On a whim, I pulled down Stocking Up and flipped to the page on apple sauce...only to send another note spiraling to the ground. "June apples should be ripe on the tree down the holler," this note read. "Bring a half-bushel basket from the woodshed, then can apples in jars from the root cellar. Fresh lids on top of the fridge."

  Spooky. How had the note-writer known I'd look up apple sauce before the fruits fell?

  I pulled out another book, and another, and used composition paper fell out of each one, answering my question. The mysterious note-writer had simply covered all possible bases, informing me about where I might choose to begin my studies of animal behavior (King Solomon's Ring was recommended) or Appalachian history (here, a library card in my name fell out of the encyclopedia, along with a hand-drawn map of the three miles between Greensun and town).

  After another hour of note-finding, I became convinced that the mysterious writer was my elusive bio-dad. One of the few facts my mother had let slip about my biological father was that, like her, he was an English major and loved to read. And, apparently, to pen enigmatic notes about apple sauce.

  A bit hurt that my father had chosen to greet me with the written, instead of spoken, word, I decided to get out of the house and see what the rest of Greensun looked like. Surely, my bio-dad wouldn't have left notes in the trees, right? I grabbed the half-bushel basket (yes, I'm far too easily swayed by parental instructions) and let Lucy lead me into the woods downstream.

  Even though I grew up in a large town next door to a much-larger city, Mom had taken a little bit of Greensun's ways across the country with her. She asked neighbors if she could harvest the unused fruits from street-side apple trees, then picked from wild blackberry and raspberry bushes along the side of the road. My brother was more likely to refuse to be involved in these shenanagins, especially as we'd gotten older, but I'd found it inspiring (and delicious) that food grew wild in Seattle's outskirts.

  When Mom was too busy to go wildcrafting with me, I often walked half a mile to a wooded park, braided my hair, and pretended to be an Indian. On the one occasion when my more-polished cousins came to visit from Massachusetts, I showed them how to make Robin Hood-style long bows out of willow branches, then laughed at my relatives for worrying over getting their clothes dirty. And when my mother took me along to visit her friend's farm, I fell in the creek accidentally-on-purpose, caught minnows in a five-gallon bucket, and brought the tiny fish home to nourish our cat.

  Which is all a long way of explaining that, though I wasn't a farm girl, I felt right at home at Greensun. More recently, A.P. Biology and scholarship applications had taken over my whimsical relationship with the outdoors, but the farm called to my younger self. And since I had nothing pressing on my agenda for the next 29 days, I smiled and gave in to caprice. A little waterfall with a pool below it tempted me to skinny dip instead of following one note's directions about washing up. ("Rain barrels or creek water perfect for bathing. Soap on sink, washtub in shed. Do NOT use soap in creek.") I floated in the water with the sun warming my face and minnows nibbling sweat off my skin, until Lucy returned from chasing a squirrel and splashed me out of the creek and back into my clothes.

  By now, my stomach was growling, and I debated whether I should head back to the house or continue on with my expedition. But "June apples should be ripe on the tree down the holler...." I turned away from the house and back to the unknown.

  Half a bushel of June apples feels pretty heavy after a while, so I shifted the container up onto my shoulder as Lucy and I retraced our steps toward what already felt like home. My canine companion was wandering across the hillside above me, as usual, so I was alone when I stepped out of the trees...and heard classical music blaring from the farmhouse where I'd left my wallet, my laptop, and every other belonging I had on this coast.

  Looking into the sun, I could make out a slender figure sitting on a chair in the yard. And just like that, my trepidation turned into a quick burst of joy. Jacob had braved Hippie Holler to see me!

  Before I could analyze my unexpected excitement (and the vision of blue eyes that filled my mind), the visitor turned toward me and long hair swung around her head. Not Jacob after all.

  "You look disappointed, and we haven't even been introduced yet!" the girl called across the yard, and Lucy came barreling up from behind me to leap onto her shoulders. "I missed you too!" she exclaimed, her attention diverted to rubbing the dog's ears and pulling a treat out of her back pocket to toss into the air. Snap went Lucy's jaws, and then my canine companion wandered off around the side of the house to eat her snack in privacy.

  Fatal shyness is one of my worst character flaws, and even though my visitor seemed friendly, I would have just as soon gone back into the woods and hidden until she went away. But I couldn't bring myself to be that rude, so I put on my best smile and offered her an apple instead, out of which she promptly took a huge bite.

  "These are the best apples for pie!" the girl exclaimed around a mouthful of green fruit. "Well, most people don't think so, but if you like your pie in the mushy, British style, Early Transparents are the way to go. What's your favorite apple?"

 
This turned out to be a trick question since every variety I knew—the Delicious duo, Macintosh, Granny Smith—made the girl's nose wrinkle up in distaste. "Virginia Beauty—now there's an apple worth eating," she proclaimed, then listed the rest of her top ten, every one of which was new to me. I should have felt chastened, but instead I was swept up in the young woman's enthusiasm and quickly agreed when she suggested picking black raspberries to go with the apples. "An apple-raspberry pie is even better than either by itself," she confided, "and the black raspberries down here are the tastiest I've ever eaten."

  I didn't realize who I was talking to until we'd picked our way all around the edges of the raspberry patch, climbing down into the creek to pluck the plumpest berries that overhung the water. "I keep meaning to ask Dad if he planted these berries or if they're wild," she said, stuffing another morsel into her mouth with purple-stained hands.

  "Did your father live here back when it was a community?" I asked in reply, and the girl stopped picking to look straight at me. She raised one eyebrow (a trick I'd practiced for hours, with no luck), then tossed her head back and laughed.

  "You really don't know who I am, do you?" she replied, and when I shook my head, she wrinkled up her nose as part of the happiest grin I've ever seen. Even though I didn't get the joke, I smiled back, and that's when she told me. "I'm Kat! Your sister!"

  I don't know which gobsmacked me more—that Stout Kat was standing before me in the flesh, or that she was my sister. "half-sister," she hastened to add when I just stood there in the creek, silently, my mouth probably hanging open and minnows pecking at my bare toes. "We have the same father," she continued. "Look, are you alright? Maybe we should go sit down."

  "So when you lived on the farm....?" I didn't even know what I was asking, but Kat was never one to be tongue-tied, so she filled me in. We'd returned to the porch when I couldn't seem to force any words out of my mouth, and Flo had come out of hiding to twine around my legs and purr her support. Meanwhile, this stranger was telling me Stout-Kat tales...from the first-person point-of-view.