“Going to Seed” by Ella Vilozny

Going to Seed

Tony didn’t want to sell the house, but it was thirty years too late to throw a tantrum about it – and anyway, he’d never been a match for his siblings when they put their heads together. After all, everything they said was true. Mom was settled at the new Riverside apartment, there was no one in the family whose life would fit behind a maze of mountain roads, and people paid good money for land in the California hills. Winter homes, he was told.
So Tabitha and Paul were flying in on Saturday to help pack up everything that hadn’t moved with their mother. But Tony drove down from Monterey a day early, in a wind that smelled like wildfires, to say goodbye.
The driveway was a quarter-mile long and pitted with new potholes. Nobody lived near enough to call a neighbor, but the woods hovered around the house like a crowd of suspicious friends.
The blackberry vines had overgrown the front gate, heavy with thorns and sour red fruit. Any July when they were all still at home, Tabby would have already been scouring the yard for the first ripe berries, ready to stash them away in the freezer for a future pie. This year, the birds had beaten her to it, and Tony had to bundle brambles aside to get to the latch.
One long thorn caught him, and he put his bleeding thumb to his mouth, just like he used to scold Tabitha for doing – it wasn’t hygienic, he’d insisted with ten-year-old authority, parroting teachers.
He ought to prune the berries back before she and Paul got home.
Their dad’s raised beds were still arrayed in the front yard, a plastic-handled spade planted in the ground between them. Wild clover and dandelions had staked their claims there, and the beanpoles were bare. 
“Could be worse,” Tony said aloud to the faded blue door. It was true; a neglected house could easily become a skeleton, one of those falling-down places he sometimes drove past on the highway with faded spray paint on the walls and windowpanes like broken teeth. Instead it was only home, a little wilder, a little emptier than he remembered.
The spare key was still waiting under the round ceramic chicken that a friend of his mother’s had brought back from Spain. Someone would have to take the chicken home or sell it; Mom already had all the mementos she wanted. And probably the realtor would want the beanpoles and trellises cleared out. How long did something have to stand in the ground before it got to be permanent?
He twisted the key in the lock and the door inched open, squeaking its displeasure at a year’s neglect. Inside, dust had settled thickly on the shelves and turned the sunlight fuzzy through the windowpanes.
The refrigerator was bare and dingy white. Paul had been the one to peel off the fluttering layers of photos and old business cards last year, which meant all but the most obviously sentimental Polaroids had gone straight into the trash bin.
It occurred to Tony, standing in the kitchen among the least-loved pots and pans and the blue rubber spatula, that the fridge was empty. Of course Paul would have cleared it out completely.
But all along the drive, he hadn’t once thought about dinner that night. He’d been driving home, and he had never gone hungry there.
The nearest grocery store closed early on the weekends, and the second-nearest, in Friday traffic, could be forty minutes each way. There might still be something heartier than dandelion greens out in the yard. But if there wasn’t, he didn’t want to know for certain yet.
In the living room, a quilt still lay over the back of the couch, the one with large polka dots so cheerful that they verged on frantic. His parents’ board games were stacked in one corner, and their scenic photographs still hung on the walls. It was a picked-over showroom all the same. Tony strode through it and up the stairs, past the closed bedroom doors, up the narrow attic steps.
Under the slanting, bare wood ceiling, nothing had changed. Cardboard boxes, all sealed with packing tape and a fine fur of dust, hemmed him in on either side as he climbed into the attic. Scrawled labels on the sides hinted at their contents: obscure dishes, tax records, once-beloved toys, and baby clothes.
It had always seemed to Tony that the attic held more forgotten possessions than a family of five could reasonably account for. It would be good to clear it out, to free up a little more space in the world. But before that work started, before Paul and Tabby and the future arrived, he lay down among the mellow detritus and closed his eyes.
He dreamed spring, sweet peas blooming the color of sunrise and his father’s hands covered in potting soil.
Tabitha was there, tiny, in overalls with ladybugs sewn on the pockets.  
“We have to be practical, guys,” she said, and turned away to fill her pockets with a cluster of plump blackberries.
There was a comic book in Tony’s hands, propped up for his brother to see. At six, Paul had no patience for reading, unless it was Spider-Man and Tony voiced the background characters. He leaned forward, digging small elbows into Tony’s knee, and sounded out, “You’ll be . . . home . . . in no time.”
When Tony woke, it was to acclimate again to the smell of distant smoke. The light was hazy with sunset.
He looked around again at the maze of boxes. Those Spider-Man comics were probably gathering dust in one of them, though he couldn’t say which. The nearest label read Wedding Crystal in his father’s blocky handwriting, and, after a puzzled moment, he remembered what it meant.
He pried up the tape and opened the box. Inside lay four fluted glasses, so thin and clear they looked liable to crumble like spun sugar at a touch.
They had been a wedding present from some faraway relative, years before Tony was born, and as far as he knew they had never been used. His parents used to joke whenever they had guests for dinner that it was time to take the crystal out, but no one had ever brought them down from the attic shelf; maybe they’d been frightened by the glasses’ delicacy. And now the house’s dinner party days had passed.
The glass did not break when he touched it. It was faintly cool in his hand — pleasant, but not precious.
He took it, and one of the oversized sweatshirts still hanging in the closet by the front door, and went out into the garden. Thinking of food, he turned by habit to the raised beds first, and again he saw the explosion of dandelions with a pang. But looking closer, he saw that the weeds hadn’t crowded all their old neighbors out. Beneath the nodding yellow heads and jagged leaves, he recognized the darker greenery of a potato plant.
Tony perched the crystal glass on a fencepost and set to work digging for the roots with the little spade. The dirt was hard-packed and dry, but it broke apart more easily as he dug deeper. When the spade hit solid vegetable, he put it aside and sifted with his hands for the potatoes, trying with indifferent success to keep his injured thumb clear of the dirt.
They were the small purple variety that cooked up without a hint of bitterness. Tonight, he would bake them in tinfoil in the woodstove. There were enough to fill the spare hoodie like a basket and enough to save for the next day, to share with Paul and Tabitha and to remember roasting them in beach bonfires when they were kids.
Evening softened the edges of the garden, preparing to steal its colors. The blackberry vines circled the house in rich, twisting green, dotted with red berries like jewels.
There were ripe ones, too, hidden here and there under overhanging leaves. Tony stood and went slowly to the fence that would not be standing next summer. He walked its length, picking blackberries and carrying them back to pile into the crystal glass. They gleamed there in the dying light and tasted painfully sweet.

Ella Vilozny

Ella Vilozny is a writer, bakery cashier, and amateur knitter living in Maine. Her work has previously appeared in Grim & Gilded and Still Point Arts Quarterly.

Headshot: Ella Vilozny

Photo Credit: Staff