Pepper Tree Times

Since I signed the pink slip for my car over to Robin in exchange for free taxi rides to places I can’t go on the Willows bus I find myself frequently waiting in the car while Robin runs into a store for something or other. I enjoy those times. There’s such a sense of freedom in getting out on the streets and roads of Orange County. The scenery is always beautiful, the weather always ideal (I’m really not exaggerating, much,) and as a passenger, not a driver, I get to gaze out the window. 

Yesterday I waited while Robin was in her own home doing a few things. The parking space faced a sunlit wall and over the top of it a pepper tree let down some branches.  Now I should explain that pepper trees are favorites of mine. The sight of one stirs up a host of memories along with its pungent perfume. Before Robin left to climb the stairs to her second story home I asked if she’d pick me off a small twig. Just big enough to scratch its stem and hold it to my nose.

As she handed it to me through the car window I said, “Oh, honey, I hate to ask you this but could you get me a pad of lined paper and a pen? I feel a blog coming on.” So, here it goes in second draft. 

I’m thinking of my earliest encounter with a pepper tree. Grandmother Darling was showing me around her little adobe house in Riverside, California and when she opened the back porch door she waved her hand over the landscape. “We can see two mountains from here, Mt. Pachapa and Mt Rubidoux. Below the short stairway lay a tiny back yard with a canopied swing perched under the branches of a large pepper tree. As we descended the steps I said, “What is that deliciously strange scent?”

“Oh, that’s our pepper tree,” she said. Immediately her use of the word “our” made the pepper tree mine too. During the two years I lived with Grandmother we often sat in the swing and somehow we never felt such a thing called "generation gap." When a certain young Marine pilot came a-courting Grandmother discreetly let the two of us occupy the swing. Captain Wallace G.Wethe had come home from the Pacific war zone where Grandmother had been writing to him. The son of former next door neighbors to my grandparents in Minneapolis, Grandmother had known him since he was a toddler. She even had his picture on her mantle when I came. The pepper tree's swing for two fit right in to her plan, no doubt. The tree looked down happily on us and when he asked me to marry him I thought I heard the pepper tree whisper, “OK.”

Skip ahead now about 40+ years. Jenny, my eight year old granddaughter who remembered her grandfather as “Wally G.” is riding home with me from the desert where we’d been to see the Ramona Pageant. We came along a stretch of the road that was lined with beautiful pepper trees. “What are you stopping for, Grandma?” asked Jenny as I slowed down and pulled off to the side of the road. “I want to smell the pepper trees,” I said. Then I told her about Grandmother’s pepper tree and about how her grandfather and I had sat together under it long ago.

“I want to cut a few sprigs off the pepper trees,” I said as I fished a small pair of scissors out of the glove compartment. She helped me gather a little bunch of them as I cut. With each sprig I said, “I’m sorry!” But they all whispered back, “It’s OK.”  After breathing in their fragrance we laid them on the back seat of the car. 

Down the road a few miles I saw something else that made me step on the brakes. “Oh, my! I didn’t know we were going to be near this place!”

“What is this place, Grandma?”

“See that sign, Jenny? It’s a place where service men and women and their wives and husbands are buried. That’s where Wally G. was buried.” She looked up and read, “Riverside Nation-al Cem-it-ary?” 

We stopped for a map and she helped me find the location. When we got out and found the headstone with his name on it we stood for a few minutes remembering. 

“If I’d known we’d be here,” I said, “I’d have bought some flowers in the last town.” 

”We have the pepper tree leaves,” Jenny said.

“Of course! They’re perfect for Wally G.” I said. “He’d love them!” 

Jenny was already running to the car. When she came back we each took a few sprigs and laid them on top of his name. I looked around at the beautiful trees and lawns with the stones nearly hidden in the grass. “Someday...” I started to say. But I didn’t finish. It was no time to tell her my name would be carved on the stone too,- someday. 

Before we left I took one last glance at the pepper tree sprigs and they seemed to say to me, “It’s OK.”