Last Stand on Jeffrey

 

By Rebel Girl's count, there are five orange trees left at the corner of Jeffrey and Irvine Center Drive, where Irvine Valley College stands. This week, she noticed activity around the two on Jeffrey.

Two workmen, a small bulldozer, tools. Reb had time, so walked over, tromping over the dusty weedy empty lot where, when she was hired thirty years ago, a full grove stood. Back then, student clubs held “orange picks” to raise funds, selling the fruit to those who would pick their own. We didn’t raise much money, but it was fun. The groves thinned as the college expanded. Through the years, she noticed others, immigrants it seemed to her, who would come to the shrinking groves in spring and cut bunches of orange blossoms. Every year, the fruit would grow, but without proper care, was small, hard, too sour to eat. No one came to pick anymore. Still, in the spring, the college still smells of orange blossoms.

The tree stood, its round crown full of pale fruit, its trunk where it met the earth surrounded by a square moat, the dirt broken into dark crumbles.

Gerardo told her that were not cutting down the trees, just digging holes around them so they could be moved. Yes, she could take a picture. Pero, por que?

Rebel Girl explained the best se could. She is a teacher at the college, and a poet. Poets like trees.

He laughed. He praised her Spanish for its accent as she apologized for everything else.

Finally they talked about Nicaragua where he was born and grew up and fled and where she had been once in 1984. The war? Yes, la guerra. Where did she go? Managua, por supuesto, Matagalpa, Leon, San Juan de Sur. A beautiful country. And now? They were in agreement about Daniel Ortega. Rubén Darío? Yes, Gerardo knew the grand poeta de Matagalpa. Everyone did.

In Darío’s poems you can find trees, lots of them.

This is one of his most famous:

Fatality

The tree is happy because it is scarcely sentient;

the hard rock is happier still, it feels nothing:

there is no pain as great as being alive,

no burden heavier than that of conscious life.

To be, and to know nothing, and to lack a way,

and the dread of having been, and future terrors...

And the sure terror of being dead tomorrow,

and to suffer all through life and through the darkness,

and through what we do not know and hardly suspect...

And the flesh that temps us with bunches of cool grapes,

and the tomb that awaits us with its funeral sprays,

and not to know where we go,

nor whence we came! ...