A Day in the Life of a ReLeaf Member-Owner
I load the van before seven, while the light is still coming in low over Mueller and the grackles are working the dumpsters behind the bakery. Two crates of crushed glass for the trellis shop on Aldrich, a sack of bike tubes for the woman who makes them into hinges, a box of jars. ReLeaf pays a little for carrying, and I'm going that way anyway. I am going that way most days.
I keep eleven gardens. They are not mine; they belong to the people whose walls and roofs they grow on, and we split what they make. Today is the Strawbactus harvest at the Delgados' on Philomena Street, which means a ladder, a pair of welding gloves, and Mrs. Delgado standing at the bottom with a bowl, telling me I'm doing it wrong. The fruit comes off the pad with a sound like a cork. She eats the first one every year, standing in her driveway, juice on her chin, and says it isn't as good as last year's. It is always as good as last year's.
At noon I eat my lunch in the van with the door open. Across the field the old hangar tower they call the Main Building is lit orange where the pumpkin vines have climbed its whole south face. I think about nothing. That is the best part of the day.
By evening I've done nine of the eleven. I save the last one for last on purpose: the first garden I ever planted, a strip of ferns and native grasses along the back fence of a duplex on Tilley, where a man named Mr. Okafor used to let me practice before I knew what I was doing. He died two winters ago. His granddaughter keeps the duplex now and leaves the gate unlatched for me.
The ferns are doing well. I'm on my knees checking the drip line when I see it.
There, hovering just above the ground near the thicket of ferns, is a silver cube.
It's about the size of an apple. It isn't resting on anything. It hangs a hand's width above the soil, turning very slightly, catching the last of the sun. I wait for it to fall. It doesn't. I wait for it to do anything at all.
When I hold my phone over it to check its Life Story, the way you do with anything you find, the screen says only: No record. Everything in this city has a record. My boots have a record. The bike tubes have a record.
I put my hand out. It's cold, though it hangs in full sun, and when my shadow crosses it, it warms, as if it knows the difference between being looked at and being held. I keep my hand there for a long time, while the light goes and the ferns turn gray, and Mr. Okafor's granddaughter switches on the porch light and doesn't come out, and I find that I am not afraid. I am only trying to remember whether I have been here before.
đźš® W.A.S.T.E.: Words Assisting Sustainable Transformation & Ecology
| Term | Definition |
|---|---|
| (Underground) | (Underground)The archive under the garden. There is a stone with a mark cut into it, a hatch behind the dryer in Unit 14, and a sub-basement door that is supposed to be locked. All three open on the same shelves. |
| Bandwidth Bloom | Bandwidth BloomThe night every light in the city blinked: not out, not off, aligned. It starts as a hum against the jawbone, and the fireflies might be tuning forks. |
| Choose Your Own Adventure | Choose Your Own AdventureA book you read with one finger saving the last choice, so that if a page ends badly you can go back. It always ends badly once. |
| Circular Economy | Circular EconomyNothing leaves; it changes hands. In 2045 money has turned into rings, like a tree has, one for each year of rain. You offer a story and a ring goes out. You need a wrench and a ring comes back. |
| Cultural Shift | Cultural ShiftRings of contribution where the price tags used to hang. The library is the main street now, and the depot, and the garden, and the mycelium carries the news. |
| Ebb and Flow | Ebb and FlowFlood the tray, let it drain, do it again: a planter’s tide. In The Verdant Veil a message is hidden in how the nutrients rise and fall, and Lex reads it off the interface. |
| Future Austin | Future AustinAustin, a few decades on: the same creek, the same bridge at dusk, a few more vines than the zoning allows. Everything here happens to people who are trying, and are not always right. |
| Glitchtotem | GlitchtotemA banner printed wrong and hung anyway. By Friday somebody has left a candle under it, and the broken instructions are read aloud on the corner like scripture. |
| Guano Bridge Books | Guano Bridge BooksA Little Free Library stocked and kept by staff of the Austin American-Statesman and the Texas Book Festival. The shelving needs some repairs, and the stewards say so plainly. |
| Icosahedra | IcosahedraTwenty-faced floats set in the creeks and the lake. Each face filters, and in the afternoon they throw the sunlight onto the water in pieces. The hawkers say they were blamed for the wrong thing. |
| Mycoremediation | MycoremediationFungi hired to do what nobody else would: eat the cleaning fluid, drink the runoff, mend the creek bank from underneath. In the Stack the mycelium also remembers. A memory of heat prepared it for more heat. |
| Organic Media and Fiction | Organic Media and FictionStories and songs made to be copied by hand, repaired, and let go. Each one is tied to a planter, a wall or a bench somewhere in the city. |
| Railbloom | RailbloomThe light rail with the living walls on its flanks. It passes overhead and the shade structures adjust for the late afternoon, and neighbors greet one another without looking up. |
| ReLeaf | ReLeafThe cooperative that keeps the gardens, the stories and the van. Nora Sanchez started it, and whoever tends it owns a share. The name is a leaf turned over. |
| Ruellia simplex | Ruellia simplexMexican petunia. Purple trumpet flowers that open in the morning and are gone by dark, replaced the next day by new ones. It spreads wherever there is water, and in Florida it is a problem. Here it is allowed one bed. |
| Skeletron | SkeletronSticks, cord, tension. Drill a hole in the end of each stick, tie the corners with square knots, and the shapes stand up by themselves. The original instructions say to build it up and down every river valley on the planet, and creeks. |
| Sky-taste | Sky-tasteA mineral sweetness in the air under the Air Canopy after it condenses and releases purified moisture. Many say it tastes of memory. A class under the trees teaches how to read the weather by it. |
| Strawbactus | StrawbactusGreen as a prickly pear pad and furred like a peach. Inside it is red and wet, and it tastes like a strawberry that spent a summer in the desert and came back changed. Mrs. Delgado eats the first one every year in her driveway and says it is not as good as last year’s. |
| The Hypercube | The HypercubeA cube inside a cube with the corners tied, folded from a pizza box in three hours. Turn it in the light and the inner cube moves against the outer one in a way the cardboard cannot account for. Left on a reference desk, it is cold under the lamp and warm in the dark. |
| Vertical Garden | Vertical GardenA garden that grows up instead of out: cans, wicks, a strip of cloth for water. It is the plain thing ReLeaf does, and the thing most of the stories hang on. Mrs. Delgado’s is the one the neighbors ask about. |
| W.A.S.T.E. | W.A.S.T.E.Words Assisting Sustainable Transformation & Ecology. Also the underground post in Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49, with its muted horn on the box and its letters that travel outside the official mail. Put a word in. It will get where it is going. |
| Waller Creek | Waller CreekNamed for Edwin Waller, the city’s first mayor. It runs south from the north end of town, past the university and the east edge of downtown, and ends in Lady Bird Lake. A song on this site sets it beside the Red River district and the live music. |