| Writing Samples - Short Stories "Citriana's Drought" |
| Citriana’s Drought A short story by Glenn A. Bruce Citriana—her parents owned orange groves—lived in a modest CBS house halfway out to the Glades off Griffin Boulevard. The house was a dark salmon color with white aluminum awnings which could be used for shutters during a hurricane. Bob and Lydia Melton, her parents, had built the house themselves back in the late ‘40s when they moved down from Boston and bought the ailing grove. Over the years, they had added several outbuildings including a large barn for their farm equipment—tractors, sprayers and the like—storage sheds for the fruit, an enclosed structure for Bob’s small, but growing collection, of old cars (this was before anyone labeled them as classics), three small sheds for garden tools, lawn mowers, carpentry items and the like. Indeed, all of these outbuildings were painted the same, unlikely, dark orangey-pink color with white trim; but even as early as the mid-Fifties, mildew had darkened every wall, eve and roof on the farm. On the south side of the house, back about thirty feet, was Lydia’s vegetable garden. They called it Lydia’s Vegetable Garden even though Bob did most of the work in it, from tilling it twice a year—Florida vegetable enthusiasts planted two gardens each year; one in September and one in January—to adding the compost, to fertilizing. But Lydia did the hard work of weeding, pruning and picking, so it was her garden. Citriana was also tasked with picking, as the crops came in, along with her brothers Syd and Colin. (There was no sense to the names Bob and Lydia chose for their kids; no one asked for any and none was ever given.) Lydia’s Vegetable Garden was in many ways the hub of family activity. In fact, the garden was, in many ways, the hub of the family. Great unspoken ceremony was given to the planting, maintenance and harvesting of the garden. Each phase of the year’s work was a tightly organized—though again, unspoken, unwritten, unplanned and deliberately unintentional—and proceeded like clockwork, with each family member acutely aware of his or her part in the operation and therefore always on task at the exact moment as needed. Bob tilled, Colin seeded, Syd tamped, Lydia toted dead plant material to the compost pit and Citriana watered. Citriana loved watering. She watered the garden whether it needed it or not. She even watered in the rain on occasion. Since Florida soil is little more than sand over porous limestone, she did little harm, except possibly to wash away the nutrients in the soil. But Bob and Lydia were so pleased that all of their children loved the garden, the land and plants and nature in general—not to mention the process of preparing and keeping a garden (which meant they also appreciated the value of growing one’s food)—they were happy to throw a little more fertilizer or compost on the patch any time Citriana got a little carried away with her watering. Citriana loved watering because she loved water. All forms of it. Fresh water, salt water, brackish water. All was good. She loved rain, canals, oceans, lakes, rock pits, run-off ditches (as long as they had water in them). She especially loved the canals that ran along most old time Florida roads from which the limestone had been excavated and crushed to form the original road bed. Once, on a trip from Miami to Tampa, along the properly named Tamiami Road, Citriana stared at the canal on the right side of the highway for nearly five hours, uninterrupted! She was looking for whatever there was to see that had to do with water: cat tails, hyacinths, jumping fish, alligators, fishermen, boats, algae, locks, Army Corps of Engineer signs, boat ramps, water insects, snakes, lilies. Even the tall Australian pine trees that grew along the canals fascinated her. Citriana loved everything about water. The way it puddled in her hand and trickled through her fingers to make dark patterns on the concrete pad next to her father’s newest old car garage. She loved it clumped and misted coming out of sprinklers. She would often turn a sprinkler on just to see if she could see a new pattern in the spray. She always could. And she could play with a running hose for hours—shooting it up onto a roof and watched the way it sheeted, then dripped off the edge of the roof. Maybe how it formed small pockets of erosion in the exposed soil along the foundation of the building. One of her favorites when she was young—until Bob made her stop because he got tired of digging it out—was to run a hose on high and stick the tip down into the sand, effectively water-mining through the soft soil until the hose got stuck (and Bob had to come dig it out). She once got a hose to dig its way over ten feet down in the earth. It was one of her proudest moments—until her father arrived with that look on his face, sighed, and reluctantly told her that the end of her water exploration with his best hoses. She understood perfectly well and gave up that practice that day. But she always had the almost eleven feet of hose memory to suffice her. Citriana loved the beach, too. But not because of the sand. She fairly well hated the sand, at least until she learned that in most of South Florida, beach sand was actually made of trillions of pieces of crushed seashells. So it wasn’t really sand at all! It was seashells, just like the fossilized shells she would examine in the endless pieces of coquina rock that comprised the low walls of the family compound—rocks that Bob and Lydia, along with Citriana’s uncles Lewis and Martin (and boy did they take shit for that in the Fifties and Sixties), had painstakingly dug from all over the property every time they needed a hole for anything, like a septic tank or drain field, a footer or a water line. At times it seemed there miles and miles of low, coquina rock walls to Citriana; so there was no shortage of archaeological research to be done, all within sight of the main, dark salmon house with the white aluminum awnings. And now, these same shells—pieces of them—were to be sieved and fingered by the trillions! And they reached out as far as her little eyes could see in either direction! But mainly, there was the water. Why, at the beach, there was so much water that one could literally not see the end of it. And just one quick look at an atlas during her first geography class in elementary school proved to Citriana that indeed there was more water on her home planet than she had ever imagined. Then! The teacher told her class that there was—Citriana listened breathless—more water on earth than land! Citriana let go a shout of glee so loud that children and teachers in four classes around hers stopped to wonder if someone was happy or hurt. Her teacher was taken aback until Citriana explained that she had just heard the single best reason for living that had ever entered her ears. And from that day on, whenever her family went to the beach, they all watched the only daughter stare out across the blue and green expanse with such utter contentment that they too felt at peace so deep within themselves that for days after nothing could upset anyone in the family. Nothing! But it all came crashing down in the late summer of ’68. A drought hit Florida like no one had seen in recorded history. Farmers waited for rain, and waited for rain, and waited for rain, but it never came. Home owners watered their lawns every day, but every next day they lawns were brown. Weather forecasters sweat profusely as they went on air to let the anxious water-deprived public know that, sorry, there was no rain in sight for the next—gulp—ten days or more. This happened every ten days. Since everyone ins South Florida was accustomed to more rain than anyone every needed, they stared up at the sky longingly on a daily—sometimes hourly—basis, and nobody spoke of anything else during casual conversation. Not church, not politics, not even taxes. Once, just one time, Bob and Lydia’s neighbors, the Kroshers, mentioned that their daughter was going to Mexico to have an abortion; but within three sentences, talk had turned back to The Drought. Citriana was sick. Her family doctor, Doctor Kinley, was so concerned at his inability to determine her precise illness, that he admitted her to County General for tests. When those test were indeterminate, Dr. Kinley had Bob and Lydia take her to the University of Miami medical school for further, more specialized tests. They too were unsuccessful. Of course, both Bob and Lydia knew what the problem was, and told Dr. Kinley several times. But, as the concerned family physician pointed out, Citriana was losing weight, completely uninterested in food, running a constant low-grade fever, and in grave danger of slipping into something akin to coma, if not akin to death itself! So, the tests continued. Drugs were administered to no effect. Psychological profiles revealed depression, based on a lack of rain, but the preeminent experts in the field proclaimed loudly that such symptoms surely should not follow natural events to such an extreme. Throughout this seemingly endless process, Citriana stayed silent. She knew what she had: concern. And her concern was so deep for the earth around her, for her mother’s shriveled garden, for the tiny, waterless oranges on her father’s trees, for the brown grass everywhere and the puny weeds along the steadily lowering canals, that she had decided: If the plants were to die, so would she. When Citriana stopped drinking water, on the premise that the ground needed it more than she did, Dr. Kinley threatened to put her on an IV – and did. Citriana objected, but she was too weak to prevent the insertion of the needle, so within a few hours, was re- hydrated to an acceptable level, and was cogent enough to accept her father’s promise that the water in the I.V. drip bag had come from somewhere else where there was no drought. He further assured her that the people there, and the earth, could spare it. Citriana made him cross his heart and hope to die. Which he did. From that moment on, she made no attempt to either remove the drip or prevent the nursing staff from replacing the plastic saline bags. And it hit Bob, with Lydia’s input: They, as a family, had to do something either to make it rain—which seemed difficult if not impossible—or somehow convince little Citriana that everything would turn out okay. Since that didn’t seem possible without rain, they discussed taking her somewhere where there was rain— perhaps the Olympic Mountains in Washington state where they had read that it rained some 362 days a year. But they figured with their luck and limited finances they would arrive on one of the three dry days. So, a Pacific Northwest vacation was scrapped. Plus, there was the farm. The groves could not go unattended for more than a few days or problems developed. Weeds, bugs, blight. It was always something. And there was the fruit stand out front on the highway. Syd was old enough to man it if need be, for short periods of time, but Colin tended to sit on his haunches in the back and draw cars in the dirt. Or airplanes if he was feeling particularly artistic that day. It was decided: The family would take a weekend camping trip to the Keys. After all, the Florida Keys were surrounded by water! In relatively mild hurricanes, the low islands were consumed by water, covered completely in some cases! One only had to stop the car, step down a few feet—at any point along the way—and stand in water! Water was everywhere in the Keys. That should prove beyond a shadow of doubt to Citriana that all was well in the world. The oceans had yet to drop because of the great South Florida drought, and were unlikely to do so. At least before they could pack the station wagon and drive the 60 miles or so to Jewfish Creek at the top of Key Largo. From then on, with Card Sound on one side and Lake Surprise on the other, a family in a Nash wagon would almost never lose sight of water for the next 130 miles. Then! Key West? Nothing but water! Everywhere! All around. Why, the closest landfall was Cuba, some 90 miles to the south. In between: Nothing but water! Citriana stood on Mallory Pier and stared at the water that ran, unimpeded, to Havana. And cried. The ploy hadn’t worked. She had stared at the floor the entire way down. Not once had she looked out the window at all that splendid, azure liquid. Not once! At one point a seagull let loose over the family wagon and Citriana looked up at the roof, hopeful of rain. But the moment her father illuminated her as to the source of the splatting sound, Citriana went back to staring at the floor and didn’t look up until Lydia announced they were at the southernmost point in the U.S. and to come look at all the water. Citriana got out, stood on the pier and wept. Her whole family wept with her. Even Syd who firmly believed he was far too old to cry, especially in public! But there he was, sobbing along with his sister, under the driest sky anyone had seen here in their lifetime. Ten more days of drought were predicted. |
