I Love Luna (48)

UNITED STATES—”Luna, you lazybones,” the master enquires, “It’s that day of the week. Time to extend your chronicles. It’s that day of the week, Luna, sweetheart.”

The hot and still weather is not the kind of weather you’d choose to go to Home Depot in. Or for that matter, go to Auto Zone. It seems not so long ago the master replaced the headlight bulb on the trusty Honda Civic coupe. And as spring follows winter, the burn-out bulb on the left has followed its predecessor on the right to burn-out.

It was clearly not winking back to the master as he pulled up to the rear of a neighbor’s shiny white Audi hatchback.

The two headlights work now only on high beam. The master sighs and slips into woe. Then something remarkable happens. He cuts off that unpleasant thought about Auto Zone and Home Depot and exchanges it for a pleasant one. Just yesterday the avocado tree sprouted from a pit in a jar has long contradicted its presumed destiny to remain forever a shade tree.

In fact, just a few weeks ago, the master contemplated removing it. Then another neighbor pointed out:

“It’s a good tree. Keep it for the shade.”

It now has four pieces if inchoate fruit, like oversize dark green cashews. The starp-eyed neighbor who alleged the thing had fruited after nine-odd years had been right! There the baby avocados were, and that nobody could deny.

After a final tepid sip of coffee, the master will go forth into the baking noonday sun to Home Depot. I, Lupe, am left lounging in the cool indoor shadows.

As a pit bull lab, I Lupe naturally get blamed for being adjacent to mishaps. A piece of old tooth filling crumbled off in the master’s mouth, as I bolted forward. He suffered a rude sensation akin to biting full force into a pitted olive that wasn’t pitted. I didn’t lay a paw on the master, but he still blames me for the broken tooth.

In the perimeter of the city hisses. Nearby, an amalgam of power saw, the beeps of a delivery truck in reverse, and the distant hum of vague machinery. A new hose will be a welcome tool to give the long-gestating avocado tree some precipitation into its roots and nurture the avocados that are now sprouting years after hopes for their arrival had vanished.

To be continued….