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(Avery)
Piper and I held each other as we sat at the dining table contemplating whether to devote more mental effort into the circumstances of our innocent first kiss in our teens.
Piper spoke up again. “If we go by my formula for falling in love, our kiss was a jump right to line five. Do you think we went too fast?”
“We did have the pressure of a deadline. You and your mom were moving to Georgia in a few days. I wanted you to know how I....”
“I suppose. Still, Avery, I don’t think us getting to the moment was spontaneous. Remembering our kiss is like I’m recalling a snippet of a dream. It’s not like I’m having any doubts it happened. I have this sense…I want to get the whole story back.”
Piper turned her head to me, and she caught me holding a reminiscent grin, which persisted as I looked at her. The expression she returned entreated me to explain.
“When you took Erin to college, did you go by your old house, our old neighborhood?”
“No,” she said. “I didn’t even think about it. We had a lot going on. Why?”
“Well, I visited the street we used to live on that weekend. I probably thought of it because my mother had died a few weeks before. I was there for our class reunion and I’m sure I had some nostalgia about the old days, too. So much had changed though. My house looks totally different, and someone added a second story to it. Hedges and trees now covered the front yard when they used to be wide open. A couple doors down, the big sycamore with the rope swing was gone from your front yard. But something, for some reason, made me happy, one thing hadn’t changed, Piper. The avocado tree in your backyard was still there. Its big green crown over the roof of your old house.”
Piper showed a glint of recollection. “The avocado tree? By now, it must be enormous!”
“Maybe it was taller, I’m not sure. It was gigantic back then.”
“We spent so many days under the tree. It was our shade in the summer. We would stay dry in a light rain under it, too. It was…a refuge. I hadn’t thought about it since we moved away. We had so much fun under the avocado tree, Avery.”
When Piper and I were children, the mature avocado tree dominated her back yard. It must have been nearly thirty-five feet tall. If you stood outside its dripline, the dense curtain of shiny, elliptical leaves hid the broad trunk. Sturdy branches reached skyward, but outer limbs drooped close to the ground, loaded with dense foliage. It was a productive tree. you could harvest a dozen or more avocados, standing in one spot, without a step ladder.
“You used to make me guacamole, Piper.”
“That’s right. Which we had with chips along with a tuna sandwich, or a hot dog, or a bean and cheese burrito!”
I burst out laughing. “I missed that kind of lunch! I bet today it wouldn’t taste as good as it did under the avocado tree.”
I remembered negotiating the maze of drooping branches and leaves toward the tree’s interior, where it opened up into a magnificent place. Under the avocado tree, you could look up through its branching structure into the crown. Filtered sunlight, infused with magic and dappled with dynamic shadows, filled this space. When you first entered the atrium of the avocado tree, your eyes needed to adjust. The dancing spots of light and shadow made an optical camouflage in which it was difficult to discern an object or a person from its background.
“Remember how I would come under the dome of the tree, and I’d have to ask where you were, Piper? The dappled pattern covered everything.”
“I liked it best when I happened to be behind you, and I made you jump!”
In the late afternoons, when the sun passed over the roof of Piper’s house, the space under the avocado tree became dim, as twilight persisted during the summer. Our little flashlights created a glow around us. On evenings when a nearly full moon rose to the east, we were treated to silvery streaks within the confines of the dome.
“I’ll never forget the books we read to each other sitting under the tree,” I recalled.
“You read to me first since you were a couple grades ahead of me. When I got old enough to handle the bigger words, we’d take turns. Narnia, EarthSea, Lord of the Rings. I’ve read them all on my own again and again. But it was nothing like hearing them out loud together.”
“Remember what happened after we finished a book?” I asked. “We moved on and started making up our own stories.”
She nodded her head. “Those days were a big reason I decided to become an English teacher. I loved what we were able to do with language and our imaginations.”
“We had tremendous imaginations, didn’t we, Pyx?”
Piper drew in a quick breath. “Nobody’s called me Pyx since the last time I was Queen of the Fireflies.” In many of our made-up stories, Piper would play the part of a pixie whose glowing radiance made her the Queen of the Fireflies.
“And, Avery, you kept my faerie realm safe. You were an elfin master of martial arts and enchanted weaponry. I gave you the name Alfi the Defender.”
We made up stories about our adventures. Finding a treasure. Defeating an evil beast. Discovering a lost city. We became the main characters in our tales.
(Piper and Avery)
We gazed into each other’s eyes, sharing this recollection from our childhood. Our gaze then turned upward as if bidden by a life force high above us. We were unmistakably looking up into the canopy of the avocado tree once again. Not as children, but as the forty-somethings we were in the present. The avocado tree towered over us, higher than it seemed when we were little kids. The avocado tree had, indeed, grown. We had grown. Yet we were back here again, experiencing it anew.
Magical light and mystical shadow made us one with the avocado tree and its surroundings beneath it. We remembered the adventures – some involving fierce battles, others of discovery, ones opening new opportunities – and the times we returned finding the two characters were falling in love. At last, out of danger, holding hands as we reentered our homeland, giving each other a hug of reassurance we were safe again, drawn closer in friendship and affection because of the adversity we had faced together.
We would declare, Pyx and Alfi, with one voice, “We will always be together.”
As children, that was how our stories would end.
Now, our grown-up selves stood up from our tree-root stools. Our minds thought about what we wanted; our hearts felt how much we wanted it.
We said a brief prayer of thanks as we gazed into each other’s eyes. Our souls listened to the stories we wove together. We delighted in our words. Our hands touched, then drew us together in embrace. Our faces came nearer as a beam of sunlight broke through the tree’s leaves moving in a gentle breeze. A light which delivered the memory we had forgotten.
Our first kiss, all those years ago, had happened under the avocado tree. In a space all our own, where no one else would see us. An instant connecting us over all the time and across all the distance. Feeling our warm breaths just before our lips touched to forge a memory that would stay with us forever.
The kiss we now shared under the avocado tree was not the awkward, momentary, inexperienced first kiss in our mid-teens. This kiss endured and we followed our passions from our clasping mouths, arousing desire in our whole bodies, desiring to shed the clothes we were wearing. We always had so much fun playing, reading, and telling stories under the avocado tree as children and teens. As grownups today, our play under the avocado tree was to have fun of a different variety.
We were both generous with our giving, so generous in making up for every day of those thirty years since our first kiss under the avocado tree.
When our generosity to one another was at last exhausted, we lay there together under the avocado tree lingering in the glowing of the magical light of the dome, the radiance of the Queen of the Fireflies.
We sensed the sun was descending westward over the roof of the house as the shadows under the avocado tree sharpened and became deeper. Though we lingered, glowing a while longer, we knew this episode was about to end.
With one voice, Pyx and Alfi, Piper and Avery, declared, “I will always love you.”