The Asparagus Along The Property Line

I put down straw from the feed store, two bales, to keep the weeds off and the damp in. And I left them alone to fern out, because the fern is the whole business. Every bit of green that stands in the sun that summer is feeding the crown for next year. You do not tidy it. You do not trim it.

By the end of June it was knee high and it leaned. Asparagus fern always leans. It looked, I will admit, like a strip somebody had forgotten to mow.

Kristin was out on the patio one evening wiping down her chairs. She called across to me, friendly enough.

“Megan? What is that along there? It looks like a row of weeds. It’s kind of flopping over toward our side. Do you want Chad to run the trimmer down it when he does ours? He wouldn’t mind.”

It had not crossed her mind. To her, asparagus was a green stalk with a rubber band on it in the cooler at the grocery. Nobody had ever told her it turned into this.

I could have said so. That sentence was there too.

I was kneeling with an armload of straw. I tucked it up under the ferns.

“I’ll stake it back,” I said. “Tell Chad thank you. I’d rather he kept the trimmer off it.”

“Suit yourself,” she said, with a little edge on it.

I drove in six stakes that night and ran baling twine down both sides so that not one frond crossed over those posts.

The party was the last Saturday in June.

It was Kristin’s doing start to finish, and she did it right. She walked up and down Maple Road herself with invitations she had written by hand, all nine houses, people she had only ever waved at.

It was a fine warm evening, the fireflies just starting over the orchard. Chad had the grill going. There were twenty-some people on and around that patio, and kids running in the grass. Kristin had strung lights. She was pink with pleasure.

I stayed near the edge with my paper plate, by my own row, where I could keep a neighbor boy and his ball out of the ferns.

Lois Brandt came late, on her grandson’s arm.

Lois lives across the road in the yellow house. She was eighty-four that summer. She taught third grade in this town for thirty-one years, Chad and me both, and she has a voice that reaches the back of a room without ever being raised. She had been in the hospital and then in rehab all spring with her hip, which is why she had missed every bit of it.

Lois did not sit right away. She stood in the middle of the patio with one hand on her cane and looked around her, at the lights, at the seat wall. Then she looked down at her own feet on the herringbone. Then out at the yard, left and right, like a woman who has set something down and cannot think where.

“Well, it’s lovely, honey,” she said to Kristin. “It’s just lovely. Now where did Rosemary’s asparagus go?”

Kristin had a pitcher of lemonade in her hand. She smiled the way you smile when you have not quite heard.

“The asparagus?”

“Rosemary’s bed. It was right along here.” Lois tapped her cane on the pavers, twice. “Forty years it was right here. I was just telling Tyler in the car. I said, I missed it this year on account of my hip, but next May you watch that porch.”