Our glasses, still mostly full, empty a little each day.
I'm sitting on our bench, underneath the fig tree.
"I can never tell."
"I'm sorry," I say.
"It makes you very curious to me. It's lonely."
Just promise me one thing.
She whispers in my ear.
I nod.
* * *
Our fig tree has always struck me as preternaturally quiet, not nearly as chatty as the native dogwoods, giving everything away like the Indian plums, abrasive like the filbert. If you're going to put on a show, put on a goddamned show, shouts the magnolia. I remember driving once through
Figs are flowers, modestly hidden from the outside world, seen and understood by fig wasps alone. Enclosed inflorescence is how the fig tree keeps her secrets to herself. Fig wasps are how she shares her thoughts with others. A fig, like the soliloquy of a silent tree. Fig wasps, sobriquet for those thoughts we keep to ourselves.
* * *
"You cannot give a nickname to a place in time," she argues. And then she thinks a moment, and says, "Never mind."
"I'll remember this day as Little Symbiosis."
* * *
The figs I remember from my youth were covered in them, tiny wasps. They would be so determined, I would later discover, to crawl into those flowers that they would often lose their wings and legs at the ostiole. I never knew what great distances they covered, or how each was bound to a single species, old bonds formed when the world's glass was nearly full.
"We're connected like this," I say.
"We don't talk."
Fig wasps, I think.
* * *
The new tree is even more reticent. And I'm distressed as the summer wanes, its glass now nearly empty, that the figs are bare, unvisited by wasps. I learn that this particular cultivar is self-pollinating, mankind's great success in cutting loose the old ties. And so I come to find I've planted in my yard a tree whose secrets will live and die in this place and time alone. The fig wasps have no interest in these self-reliant creatures.
"Where are you right now?" she asks.
Some days, the glass empties faster than others.
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