The Pinecone
Getting out of her Honda to collect her daily take of bills and advertising flyers from the big metal mailbox, still warm from the afternoon sun, she kicked the cone into the oleander growing pretty and poisonous off to the side.
It didn’t improve her humor to find among the bills a postcard from her sister Gretchen, an archaeologist with Kansas University spending the summer in a whitewashed fishing village on the northeast coast of Crete, digging for traces of offerings to the ancient gods. Gretchen had the life Mandy should have been leading, if only Mandy at the crucial juncture hadn’t been ambitious and pigheaded and determined that it was a much better thing to get into information technology and land a high-paying job in fabled Silicon Valley.
Where she kept telling herself “We’re a long way from Kansas, Toto!”
*
The pinecone was back the next morning.
It was there when she got home and had grown even bigger during the day (feeding on squirrels, maybe, or baby quails, or crow pie.) She began to see it in her mind’s eye—while microwaving refried beans on a sun-dried tomato basil wrap for dinner, while paying bills and watching a rerun of The Office—like a giant floater, the ominous blimp that hovered over ballparks, the solid mass of a tumor, the one that had killed her mother, Sally, at age sixty-eight after an abortive Valentine’s Day visit with her boyfriend Ed in Tuba City, Arizona, to which his health care recruiting firm had relocated.
Mandy tried to draw some lesson or another from the pinecone. To see it as the denizen of ancient pine forests, bearing the wisdom of the ages, like the slow, patient account of tree rings. To consider it the moral of a story, some wise Hindu Veda or Zen teisho—or even one of those Thurber fables about talking animals. But this cone was mute and opaque and thoroughly modern. Nor did it seem moral in the least.
*
On Friday night, lying awake after her beastly week and listening to the maddening noise of another TGIF party in the big house above the tennis court behind the tiny cottage she rented from an HP executive, she tried to imagine what stories might attach to it. To picture the giant Johnny Appleseed who might have planted it, the giant squirrels that might haul it away. She got up after a restless hour and turned on her laptop, googling “pinecone: images.”