Just In Case
The picture above took me back to a July afternoon in my mother’s garden in Trivandrum. My mother has a few coconut saplings in her backyard. One afternoon, we noticed something unusual about one of them. The tender leaves at the center looked disturbed, the leaves were curling, one of the leaves was wilting as if it is dehydrated and one was turning brown from its base.She called her man Friday and asked him to check the coconut sapling. She also told him to bring his tools when he came, as the hibiscus, camellia, and a few other flowering shrubs needed pruning.That evening, he came over and took a closer look at the sapling. He examined the tender leaves and the center of the plant and told my mother there are pest inside the sapling and it requires spraying.A couple of days later, he came with a garden sprayer. He filled it with a medicine meant for coconut trees and carefully sprayed it into the tender leaves.We stood there watching. A few moments later, we noticed something moving inside the plant. Then another one.To our surprise, two large beetles crawled out from between the tender leaves. They had been hiding there all along, quietly damaging the young coconut sapling.My mother watched the beetles emerge and then looked closely at the sprayer.”Where did you get that?” she asked.He gave her an answer that didn’t really answer the question. My mother wasn’t going to let that go.I mentioned the sprayer to my nephew, and he found a similar one online and ordered it for her. The sprayer her man Friday used was pink. The one my nephew ordered for my mother was teal.I was with her when the Amazon delivery arrived. She was delighted when she opened the box. I thought we had finally solved the garden-sprayer situation.Except we hadn’t.Even today, when her plants needed spraying, my mother still calls her man Friday and asks him to bring his pink sprayer.Naturally, we asked her why she didn’t use the teal one her grandson had bought for her.Her answer was simple.”I’ll keep this one safe just in case.”Just in case of what, we never quite figured out.But the teal sprayer was safely placed in the garden tool room, where it continues to wait patiently for its moment.