Betty's (Little Basement) Garden

by Laurel Dewey

  Every fifteen minutes, she got up and stirred the green, oily infusions with a wooden spoon, checked the temperatures and gradually inhaled more of the vapors. At one point, Betty lifted the spoon from the coconut oil brew and allowed the emerald drops of cannabis to fall back, one by one, into the crock-pot. This seemingly rudimentary process became fascinating to her. She’d never really looked at a droplet of oil before, but now she was focused and consumed by the sight. Betty allowed the jade-colored drops to fall into her palm, but instead of returning them to the crock-pot, she rubbed the oil into her arm. Holding her palm close to her nose, she was both attracted and repulsed by the aroma. Without realizing it, she started to rub the residue across her face and noted how warm her skin felt. Another half hour passed and Betty dutifully stirred the two concoctions. Dipping a tablespoon into the cocoa butter infused cannabis, she held the spoon to the ceiling light to check the color. And then, instinctively and strictly from force of habit, she put the tablespoon into her mouth, removed the smooth substance with her lips, and swallowed. There was about a three second pause before Betty realized what she’d done. Frantically, she turned on the faucet and did everything she could to rinse out her mouth, even taking the sprayer and blasting it across her tongue. She turned off the faucet and waited, wondering what in the hell was going to happen to her. How could she be so stupid? It was a cook’s knee-jerk reaction, she kept telling herself. But then, part of her wondered if that was true.

  Ninety more minutes elapsed and her kitchen smelled like Woodstock at high noon in 1969. She’d read the same damn paragraph in her magazine on marinating shallots five times, and it didn’t make any sense. The second she thought that, she couldn’t remember what she just thought. And the more she tried to remember even the concept of what she’d been thinking, the more elusive the thought became. “Oh, dear,” she whispered, realizing now that proper ventilation and gloves were probably mentioned for a good reason. But it was too late for that. Each time Betty got up to stir the pots and check the temperature, the five-foot jaunt across the kitchen floor took more time and planning. By 4:00 am, the simple process of extricating herself from the chair required the kind of advance planning that goes into royal weddings and shuttle launches. Her body felt exceptionally relaxed but also as if lead weights encircled her feet. Everything around her slowed down. What seemed like half an hour, took place in five minutes.

  At first, there was detachment and her vision briefly blurred. Then, it was if she saw herself as two distinct personalities. One of them was familiar and the other distant. As odd as it seemed, the familiar persona was the one she’d buried so long ago. The distant one was who she had become. This strange division scared the part of her that continued to move into the distance. But the free spirit that had been hidden seemed to relish the sensation. Fear didn’t touch that sparkling part of her. Regret and pain didn’t seem to affect it either. And as she allowed that part of her to become dominant, she settled into the moment and just was. The lights in the room seemed brighter. The classical music playing softly on the radio was louder and more precise. In fact, Betty could hear every instrument in the piece, as well as the thoughts the composer had when he was creating the composition. She had to check herself on that one. The thoughts he had, she mused. But in that pocket of time, sitting there at the kitchen table, she felt connected to the music and could feel the breath of the composer over her shoulder.

  Another hour passed, and the indiscernible vapors in the room deepened. It felt as though her head was being pulled backward. Her mouth went dry and there were abrupt missing pieces of linear time. Then the strangest thing happened. Time, it seemed, caved in on itself and was bendable. Fluid, like mercury oozing against a silver spoon and flowing back into itself, gently coalescing and flowing freely. Every time Betty let fear enter the equation, she felt the free spirit move into her heart and calm her anxiety. And then, quite suddenly, there was only the now. The past was dead and the future wasn’t manifest. But it was deeper than silence. It was all that ever was and all that ever would be. It was nothing and it was everything. In essence, it just was.

  She laid her head on the kitchen table, using the magazines as an improvised pillow. A distant but distinct hum filled her ears, as the pressure became more intense around her forehead. She heard herself speak a short prayer and then she fell asleep. Lifting her head, she was sure she’d melted into a dream. She was still in the kitchen but it appeared electrified. Sparks of light twinkled above her in a syncopated rhythm. Betty pinched herself. Yes, it was a dream. Time felt suspended and her mind was empty. “How odd,” she said to herself without speaking. This was a dream, she kept telling herself, but then she began to doubt it.

  Out of the ether, she heard a voice she hadn’t heard in years. “You were always such a good girl, Betty. We never had a whisper of trouble from you. And you always did what you were told. Dear Lord, what happened?”

  Betty turned around and saw her mother standing there. She was wringing her hands with worry and wearing an apron Betty remembered from her childhood.

  “Where did I go wrong Betty?” her mother asked her, without moving her lips.

  “Good God, Betty!” another voice bellowed.

  Betty turned around. Standing in the corner of the kitchen was her father.

  “I’m glad I’m not alive to see this!” he growled. “My heart couldn’t take it, and I’d have another stroke that’d take me out!”

  A fist bore down on the kitchen table. Betty jumped and spun around. She stared into Frank Sr.’s angry eyes. “What in the hell are you doing?” he barked, leaning over the kitchen table. “Have you lost your goddamned mind?!” Frank tilted closer to Betty. “Get rid of that shit now! Christ Almighty, Betty! What’s wrong with you?”

  Their voices tangled together, each one loudly demanding she immediately stop what she was doing. As the cacophony grew, Betty closed her eyes and pressed her hands to her ears to subdue the mounting fury directed toward her. Finally, she couldn’t take it any longer and screamed, “Stop it! You have no right anymore!”

  And then there was silence. She opened her eyes and saw Frankie standing in front of her. He was gaunt and pale but he held his hand out toward her. She heard his voice within her heart.

  “It’s okay, mom,” he whispered and smiled. “Remember the words on the tree?”

  Betty’s eyes filled with tears. She nodded. “But I can’t do that.” She stared into his sad eyes. “God, Frankie. You’re so real.”

  “You won’t remember any of this.”

  “But I will,” Betty heard herself mutter in her head. She reached out to take her son’s hand but the distant bleat of the cooking timer tore her away. She jerked awake and quickly sat upright in the kitchen chair. It was 7:00 am and she hadn’t forgotten a thing. Through the dizzying blur of cannabis vapors that now saturated every inch of the kitchen, she could still feel those ghosts hovering close by. Staggering to the crock-pots, Betty checked the temperatures and turned off the heat. She managed to make it back to the kitchen table and sat down. Her head felt weighted to a wall of bricks. She stared across to the sink and fixated on the faucet. It was so comforting and completely enticing she couldn’t help but stare even deeper, until there was just the faucet and Betty occupying that moment. In fact, she was so engrossed, she didn’t hear the back gate open or the footsteps approaching the back door. And she didn’t see the figure standing at the back door even after the distant taps on the pane of glass.

  “Betty?”

  Chapter 12

  “It’s time, Betty.”

  Betty turned to the back door. Jeff stood there, peering in with a look of concern. She didn’t move a muscle.

  “Betty?” Jeff repeated. “Are you okay?”

  Somehow, she lifted herself out of the chair and opened the door, letting him inside. The second Jeff walked into the kitchen he backed up.

  “Oh, hell!” he exclaimed, covering his nose, almost overcome by the intense vapo
rs. It took him another few seconds to figure it out. “Pot?”

  Betty stood motionless and then turned toward the open door, realizing how refreshing the morning air felt on her face.

  Jeff checked the two crock-pots, lifting the lids and stepped back again from the heady aromas. “Betty, we have to open some windows!” He opened the door into the living room along with every window in the kitchen. “How long have you been inhaling all this?”

  Betty was still drinking in the sweet, morning air. “About six hours I think.”

  “Six hours?” He took the lid off one of the pots. “Did you try any of it?”

  “Yes. Purely by mistake.”

  “Right. That and ‘No, officer, the pot belongs to my friend’ are two popular responses.”

  Her mouth was seriously dry. “Okay. I might admit to taking more than I should have judiciously ingested. And there was that lack of ventilation part as well…”

  He finished cranking open the last window and turned to her. “Are you okay?”

  She touched the top of her head. “I can feel the part in my hair.”

  “I bet you can.” He moved toward Betty, taking her hand. “Come on, let’s walk outside in the backyard. Nice kitchen, by the way.”

  She slowly made her way out the door with him. “Thank you very much. It cost more to remodel it than to buy a nice motorhome. But the kitchen doesn’t have any wheels so you can’t go anywhere when you’re in it.”

  “Oh, brother, you really are stoned.” He guided her to the bench, underneath the elm tree.

  “I’m not stoned,” she replied, a sense of umbrage rising.

  He grinned. “Yeah. Right. You’re not stoned and chickens have four wings.”

  She looked at him, a sense of alarm tracing her face. “Oh, God. I am stoned. Lord help me. When will the paranoia start?”

  “It already began when you registered as a Republican,” he said, his blue eyes twinkling.

  “Oh, hell. I don’t want to end up like one of those people who hoist their old couch up on the roof so they can lie down and get loaded while they watch the sunset.”

  “Wow. Memories. It was a lawn chair for me. Easier to hoist.” He turned to her. “Take a lot of deep breaths.”

  Jeff guided her through a series of deep breathing exercises that seemed to clear a few of the cobwebs in her head. After half an hour, the sense of detachment started to subside.

  “Hey,” she said, “how in the hell did you know where I live?”

  He held up her driver’s license. “You left this at the store yesterday. I found it on the floor by the cash register.”

  “Oh, dear. What if I’d been pulled over and didn’t have this?”

  “I think the amount of pot you were carrying would have trumped the missing driver’s license.”

  Betty put a weary hand to her now pounding head. “Oh my God…this is not me…this is not me…”

  “Maybe it is you. Elizabeth Cragen signed that letter to the editor. Not Betty Craven. Maybe Betty Craven is really a wild, unchained pot head –”

  “Stop it! That’s not what this is at all!” It took her twenty minutes, but she explained her altruistic medical motives behind the cannabis brews. With each minute, the clarity increased. She told him about Peggy and Peyton and summed it up by explaining Peyton’s offer to help her become a caregiver and set up her own grow operation.

  He sat back and pondered her words carefully. “I don’t think there are a lot of women who do this. Isn’t growing pot a young man’s game. You know, twenty-somethings who are already living in their parents’ basement and need a job?”

  “I imagine it is.” She thought for a second and suddenly brightened. “But I could bring some class to it, not to mention outstanding gourmet chocolate creations.”

  Jeff chuckled. “Betty, I’m confused. What in the hell happened between the time you signed that letter to the editor and turning your kitchen into a vaporizing hut?”

  As hard as she tried, she couldn’t figure out how to describe it. “I guess the pan began simmering with Jeremy Lindholm, and it boiled over with Tom Reed.”

  He regarded her with a look of confusion. “Okay.”

  Betty played nervously with the edge of her sleeve. “Did you ever wake up and realize you couldn’t continue living your life the way you had been? That if you spent another goddamned day doing the same crap, thinking the same thoughts, and recycling the same mistakes, you’d just as soon not live at all?”

  Compassion colored his face. “Yeah. It’s been about twenty years since I felt that, but yeah. I went through the usual growing pains in my twenties. Did drugs. Drank booze. Got married way too young and divorced seven years later. Hit the proverbial wall at twenty-nine. One day, I had a come-to-Jesus moment and quit the drugs, quit the booze, quit California, and taking a revised page out of John Denver’s songbook, I was born in the summer of my thirtieth year, coming home to a place I’d never been before.”

  “That’s it? You just moved to Colorado and that solved everything?”

  “No. I found my passion,” he replied succinctly. “Plants, herbs, growing organic food, alternative health. Maybe I just poured myself into another addiction, but it’s been working for over twenty years, so if it ain’t broke…”

  Betty ruminated on some quick math. He found himself at thirty and it had been over twenty years. So, what did that make him? Fifty-two? And then she quickly wondered why she even cared. “You found your passion. I like that term.” She ruminated some more. There was still a vaporous edge inside her head, but the cobwebs were slowly clearing. “Marijuana is still a drug though, isn’t it?”

  “I don’t look at it like that anymore. I think it’s like any other healing herb out there; it can used or it can be abused. I’ve done a bit of reading on medical marijuana, given the industry I work in, and I’m really impressed by the research. There was this alternative doctor on NPR the other day, talking about some studies the government buried since the Nixon administration, on how marijuana can slow down cancer growth. Did you hear it?”

  “No. I don’t like NPR. All the male reporters sound like pussy whipped, castrated adolescents, and all the female interviewers sound like strident, feminist bitches.”

  He laughed a hearty chuckle. “Yeah, yeah, I know what you mean. But it was an interesting interview. Every part of the plant is useful, including the root. Most people who give their opinions about pot are just going by what they’ve heard or maybe some bad experience they had with some crap weed that was sprayed with chemicals during the growing process. I don’t think a lot of naysayers take the time to do the research, because if they did, they would see they’ve been totally brainwashed by the powers that be.” He leaned forward. “All those who wander are not lost. All those who drink are not drunks. And all those who use pot are certainly not losers. There’s too much hysteria and not enough information. I mean, they make these incredibly stupid comments, like, “People who smoke pot are violent.” Give me a break. If you’re really stoned, you might get agitated with someone, but after one minute you’ll forget what you were pissed off about. People who use pot don’t get in cars and speed or drive aggressively. Most people who use and drive go thirty in a sixty mile an hour zone, and like the old joke, sit at a stop sign, waiting for it to turn green.”

  “Yes, well, that’s a good example of why I’ve always been of the opinion that a society without self-discipline cannot be trusted to self-medicate.”

  Jeff sat back and stared at her. “Really? That’s truly your opinion? You sure that’s not someone else’s words you’re just repeating?”

  Betty stopped and considered his question. “Well, I think the statement has some merit.”

  “Okay, so we allow drugs, booze, caffeine and cigarettes only to those who have self-discipline. And the rest who don’t have self-discipline, what do we do with them? Shoot ‘em?”

  “I have no idea.” Betty began to see the glaring holes in her declaration.


  “If we shoot all the people who suffer from a lack of self-discipline, we’ll have about three hundred and fourteen left on this planet, and they’re all going to be monks, hermits, a few Olympic athletes, anal retentives and people with obsessive compulsive disorder.” He shifted in his seat. “I mean, isn’t this really just about control? Isn’t all the legislation just another way of attempting to regulate human behavior? I don’t care what laws you pass or how many flashy ad campaigns you pay for, people will always seek out ways to escape and dull their pain. It’s built into our psyche. There’s no way a government or a society will ever be able to control that. I’m of the opinion we all have the equal right to either destroy ourselves or succeed beyond our wildest dreams. It’s our choice, and I don’t believe somebody who doesn’t know me has the right to tell me which one is better for me.”