Today I share Renee Lajcak’s essay, read by the author. Renee writes both for the page and for performance, adjusting her style for each. “For spoken word, I use shorter sentences, more repetition. On the page, you can be more abstract. For listeners, I keep it visual, ‘in your face’,” she says. Performing lets her shape how her audience experiences her stories through her stress and intonation.

In the early afternoon, I check on my two pawpaw fruit trees in the backyard. I have two varieties, so that I can use them to pollinate each other someday. But this year, only one is big enough to have flowers, so I collected soft specks of gray pollen from the pawpaw trees at Olbrich Gardens and the Arboretum using a small artist’s brush. Then I carefully “painted” the swelling light green centers of my female flowers, soon to turn male and produce their own fuzzy gray pollen. I was a bee, a large bumbling bumblebee perhaps, twerking with nature in hopes of producing mango-banana tasting pawpaw fruit. This afternoon I spot two tiny “hands” of fruit already forming! They are only the size of fennel seeds now, but undeniably fruit. I am a successful, delighted bee, so delighted that I could buzz.

My late afternoon backyard is a palette of greens, announcing that life and living are the priorities of the season. The yellow surprised faces of the daffodils are gone, as are the stoplight reds of the tulips. Only the sprinkles of pink bleeding hearts and lavender periwinkles contrast with the theme of green. The greens range from the intense dark green of the grape leaves to the softish-bluish green of some other climbing vine on the back fence. There’s the crayon green of the grass too, still long after the foot-long grass was finally cut, only 10 days into No Mow May. The grass had grown so long that it had fallen over into luscious heaps. Ah… a wonder and a delight to lie on my back, bare feet pressed towards the earth and wriggle down, a sensuous feeling that always reminds me that I too am a part of Life.

Spring fever is in the air. The birds are insistent, calling for mates and protecting their nests. During the golden hour, the lowering sun lights up itty-bitty insects and fluffy bits falling from the trees. The insects fly wildly, 90-degree turns and U-turns back and forth, up and down, screaming, “SEX! SEX! SEX!” The fluffy bits float slowly down, and occasionally up on gentle drafts. Both of them are seeking reproduction, I assume, but have totally different approaches. The insects are all motivational speakers, while the fluffy bits are meditation instructors. Or maybe only lackadaisical meditation students. Either way, I muse that I am now more like the fluffy bits than the goal-oriented insects.

The day is done. There is a shadow of cheek blush still in the sky, but the colors in my yard are fading to gray. Everything attempts a certain stillness. The evening birds are starting to call in that lonely, hollow way. The lilacs send out waves of their deeper evening scent. The heady fragrance reminds me of an impish but innocent lover who woke me in the morning with lilacs on my pillow. A long-ago delight that still teases me into a faint but lingering smile.

© 2025 Renee Lajcak

Renee is a newly retired English language teacher who has taught in several Asian countries but now enjoys her woodsy backyard the best.  She loves the connections made through storytelling and teaching conversational English, but writing about memories allows her to go inward to contemplate the good, the bad and the ugly.  But mostly the good.