Around Here

A 2,000 acre brush fire is smouldering fifteen miles north of my home. A couple weeks ago, we were surrounded on three sides; the smoke hung in the streets like morning fog. The fires have grown worse each year. I don't remember seeing any when I first moved down here sixteen years ago. And instead of hurricanes, we had an afternoon thunderstorm each summer day that soaked in by nightfall. Strange days, mama... photo: Robert Garcia

He recognized her voice. It was Tracy Burns, the niece of Kate Pringle, an acerbic elderly lady on the third floor whom Tracy was visiting from out of town. They had met at a condo function, a pot luck. She had been tipsy, pleasantly expansive and a little snarky. They crossed paths at the elevator several days later and exchanged pleasantries. They seemed to be hitting it off with a subtly agreeable indolence, and parted smiling. Now as the sun was setting, he could hear a voice, a call, floating up to the periphery of his awareness from somewhere outside. He assumed at first that it was a neighbor, or a television. As he approached the back bedroom it dawned on him slowly, impossibly, that it was Tracy's voice: "I like you... why don't you like me?" She was out there for hours. The plaint, rising up into the deepening night, came at enigmatic intervals. "I like you... why don't you like me?" At first he was mildly alarmed, but titillated... then oddly...

"Am I supposed to feel haunted?" "Not really... but I guess I would too." "Is it okay if I cry?" "It's okay if you cry." So that, surprising himself, is what he did. He threw his head in her lap and sobbed and sobbed until there was nothing left but laughter. Then they pedaled home where they smoked some weed and listened to the Goldberg Variations while the chili simmered.

When she wheeled up with the grocery cart and opened the trunk of the car with the remote keypad, the egret didn't move. This filled her with a surge of delight. She transfered the groceries into the trunk with delicate stealth, hoping to prolong its stay. She brought the trunk lid down with an attenuated airborne swoop. As she approached the driver's side, she wondered if the bird would suddenly ascend, wings flapping chaotically. But it only shifted slightly on its matchstick legs. "I've been waiting for you," it said, in a voice whose kindness left her breathless. "You have?" she said, as a huge blanket of serenity seemed to waft down upon her. Her eyes welled with tears, and she could scarcely contain her joy. "Open the door," the egret said calmly, craning its neck around to peer into her eyes. "We have so much to talk about." She clicked the keypad and the door sprang ajar. Stepping slightly aside she opened the door, and the ...

T he laelia is a Brazilian orchid species. Which is to say it is not a cross or hybrid but a species found in this form in the wild. When I first started growing orchids twenty years ago, this one, which I'd seen only in articles or the occasional catalog, was the one I dreamed about most... a dream that became a decade-long quest, and would find its awakening in Florida. Mine is in bloom, producing a record 26 flowers this year. I've raised phaleanopsis, the "moth", flowers floating like its nickname on slim arching stems. Cattleyas, the showy hybrids that my mother wore, beaming with pride and girly delight, to Mother's Day lunch. I've nurtured tiny equitant oncidiums, colorful gypsies no bigger than a dime. I've stalked the New Jersey Pine Barrens for wild snow-white lady slippers, which would suddenly appear, in a ground-hugging flock, at the edge of a brook. But the laelia eluded me. I went to the Miami Orchid Show a couple years ago, mounted at the C...