“I think Cliff has some,” said Susan, “And I have to go out to his farm
today. Do you want to go with?”
I knew Cliff. He had grown for
the Sisters when we ran our cannabis co-op years ago. I knew he grew organic, but I also knew that
he never kept track of his strains, he never cured properly, and he always
pulled his crops too soon. I also knew
he was a bit crazy. Cliff earned his
crazy, though, having lost a brother and mother to a home fire, and his dad a
few months later to sheer heart-ache.
That was five or six years ago and Cliff has lived as a hermit ever
since. Eschewing people for dogs, and
goats. Trauma changes people. Cliff’s crazy isn’t really crazy to me. Pets are healers, and he is just self
healing.
Susan agreed to pick me up at noon, and we drove to the bank. Knowing that we didn’t know what he had, or
what he would charge for it, I explained to Sister Susan, “I’m taking out a
thousand dollars and I’ll see what it gets us.”
I knew Cliff never went out, never had visitors, didn’t read the local
papers, nor pay much attention to news, so I exchanged my habit for
lay-clothes. I was quite sure he didn’t
know I had become a nun.
It was 105 degrees out when Susan and I were rolling up on the dusty
road in front of his property. We sat
out there with the car idling, basking in the cold air pumping from the vents,
while Susan called him to let him know we had arrived. “There’s no entrance gate to his property,”
Susan explained, as she hung up. “He
took it out recently; he said if there is no entrance, any police coming on his
property are actually doing breaking and entry.” I smiled a weary smile. I knew this would be an adventure.
Cliff arrived in a souped up golf cart. He had a battery powered hand drill to remove
screws from the metal fencing, and I waited and watched from the car, as he
also had to untie numerous pieces of twine that were holding bits and pieces of
the fence in place. Reluctantly, we shut
off the engine and got out into the hot sun.
“You cut your hair,” he said – his very first words to me. I think I must have given him a confused look
because his next words were, “What happened to your braids? When I saw you last they hung on your
shoulders and I liked them.”
“Hello, Cliff,” I said, smiling and stepping into a stiff hug. As we stepped through the open section of
fence, he got busy re-drilling the metal sheets in place, re-tying the metal
bars. “Get in the cart, Ladies.”
We drove the cart about fifteen feet when he stopped the engine, jumped
out, and using keys for multiple locks, opened another gate, drove
through. Stopped, jumped out and
re-locked it. Once through that, we rode
across several acres of dusty, sandy, barren land, passing dilapidated
structures, the stumps of harvested cannabis plants, and his herd of goats,
lying under a canopy that was the nicest structure in view.
He pulled the golf cart onto a little path that led through an open
gate at the front of his house. We
walked through an enclosed garden that held approximately twenty mature,
un-harvested cannabis plants. We walked
through his house, where the air conditioning felt heavenly, but the noise from
the seven yappie dogs unbearable. Susan took
a seat on a recliner, announced that she would wait for us there, and we
continued through the kitchen door, out to the back side of the house. We then walked across a half acre of more
flat, dry land to a place where eight mature cannabis plants stood alone waving
slightly in the hot wind.
“This is my CBD crop.” He said, pointing to the plants that towered
above me in the hot sun. I shaded my
eyes to look up, to assess their height.
I inspected the bud. “What kind?”
I asked.
“I’m not sure any more.” Cliff answered. And I smiled, because I was quite sure he
wouldn’t know. I’m quite sure the reason
he doesn’t keep track of his strains is because he cannot read or write. He was raised on that farm. Even though he is now near sixty, he and his
brother and mother and father lived there, and ran the scrap metal business
together for nearly forty years. Then
one summer, they all crossed over and left Cliff to care for the dogs – and the
goats, and the environmental clean-up of the property.
“This woman brought me seeds she bought from either a dispensary or a
seed bank. They were all labeled and
stuff, but I didn’t keep ‘em. She had cancer,
and asked me to grow her CBD. I was just
about to harvest it, and she died.”
“Oh, Cliff, I’m so sorry.” I said.
Just recently, I had a cancer patient reach out to me from Oregon and I
played telephone tag with his care-giver for a week, at the end of which, I was
notified that the patient died.
“Oh, I didn’t know her very well,” he explained. “A friend of a friend, kind of thing. I don’t even remember her name. Flo, I think.
Yeah, I think it was that.”
The patron saint of Sisters of the Valley is Florence Nightingale. My Grandmother’s name was Florence. I smiled
again. I appreciate synchronicity, even
standing under what was by then, a 107 degree mid-day sun.
It appeared to me that the eight plants were from eight different
strains. “Do you remember any of the
strain names, Cliff?” I asked, hopefully.
“Cannatonic.” He said. “That’s
the only one I remember. But she said
they were all high CBD. It’s why I kept
them far away from my other plants.
See? They have their own
acre. I needed to make sure I didn’t mix
them up.” It was quiet for a moment as I
wondered how many more weeks before they were ready to harvest. As if he read my thoughts, Cliff said, “If
you take them right now, you can have them.”
“What?” I asked, totally puzzled.
“They aren’t ready!”
“Their past ready.” He said.
“I’ve already harvest twenty big-uns, out front! Didn’t you see when we were driving past the
goats?”
“I saw.” I said, and refrained from having a discussion with him that I
knew would go no-where. It was September
seventeenth. No one harvested outdoor
this early. No one did – by choice,
anyway.
“I started a new business.”
I began to explain, but he waived me away saying, “I know, I know, you use it
to make salves and stuff. You can have it, but you gotta take it now before I
shoot someone. I’m getting my whole crop
in because the east avenue gang of tweekers is coming for it. I’ma cutting this today one way or
t’nother. I was gonna just feed it to my
goats, but then Susan called . . .”
“Don’t feed this to the goats!” I said, shocked. “America is currently sold out of bulk CBD! People are pre-ordering for Fall harvests! I would have to ship it in from Europe right
now!”
“Well, I tried to give it to the cancer society, but they wanted my
social security number, so I had to just hang up the phone.” I smiled.
This from the man who has a wall-sized American flag hanging in his
living room. He loves his country. He hates his country.
“Well, Lady, you can have it all, if you want it.”
“Hell, yes, we want it! Of
course we want it. But, Cliff, this will
not all fit in my little Ford. Let me go
get a van, let me call my son . . . “ I pleaded. It was now past one o’clock and the day was
getting hotter. His whole property was
dry dirty-white sand, spotted with tumble weed and cannabis root stalks.
“Don’t you worry about your car.
I’ll make it fit. Worry about the
goats.” He warned, as he started cutting at the base of the tallest of the
eight plants. I put out my arms as forty
pounds or more of a cannabis tree was handed to me. I swear it made me sink two inches down into
the sand. I had sandals on. I had a linen skirt and blouse and a straw
hat and lipstick and mascara and I was about to carry eight huge plants across
a half acre of sand, one at a time, and that was just the first part of a
multi-part journey to the car.
While I trudged across the sand, I was mentally shaking my head in
disbelief. “Really? Really, my angels and Guardians? This is what you want me to do to get
CBD?” But then my other Gemini twin
said, “You ungrateful brat! You just
scored ten pounds minimum of CBD bud and ten pounds minimum of CBD leaf and it
was donated and you have it for your moon cycle batch! And you are complaining about the form of
delivery? Suck it up, girl!” I stood and wiped my brow after dropping the
first load. “You can do this, Kate.” I told myself.
I started to think of Flo, in heaven, watching us and smiling with
pride that she managed to get her medicine into good hands. Cliff and I toiled wordlessly for the next
hour, sweat pouring into our eyes, stopping only once to get some water. When we were done, we had a huge pile by the
back door of his house.
“Now you go in and set for a bit,” he said, “While I load up the golf
cart.”
“Hey, Cliff, would the goats leave us alone if we give them an
offering? You know, give them each a
stalk?” I asked seriously, but Cliff chuckled.
“Not my goats. They want it all
and they know they can have it all.
Nope, we’ll just have to take the long way around the property. I will get their food out, and that might
distract ‘em . . . “ He looked
worried. All I needed was an attack of
the goat herd. I had seen the damage
goats could do.
Uitendelijk (finally), Susan and I drove fifteen miles back to the
abbey with eight foot cannabis trees hanging out the trunk of the Ford
Focus. He had no plastic bags, no
blankets or tarps, and he kept insisting it was all good and that no one would
bother us. When we pulled into the
driveway, Susan and I, feeling relieved and victorious, my son came out, took
one look at the car, and he was the first to begin scolding us.
“Are you crazy, Mom? Have you
totally lost your marbles?” He was all
puffed up and angry-looking. Susan and I
both had stupid grins on our faces and that just made him madder. “Who does this?” he asked rhetorically,
waving to the tail of the car. Behind
him came Italia. “What in the f*** are
you doing?” he said, rubbing his eyes, as if he couldn’t believe what he was
seeing.
“It’s CBD.” I announced, “And really, Italia, I would have done it any
other way, if I could, but the guy who donated the crop, well, he’s kind of a
hermit, and he is dealing with some gang of bandits, and we had no choice but
to take it right now.”
“You couldn’t get the van? Why
didn’t you take the van? Why didn’t you
call me?”
“He wouldn’t let me. I didn’t
take the van because I thought it was a business meeting. Look at me!” I said, lifting my skirts to
show him my scratched and dirty feet, my ruined sandals.
“Don’t stand there talking,” Italia said, “We have to get this into the
garage.”
Later that night, Chico gave me a bunch of words on how my little stunt
put the whole house and family at risk of gangsters robbing us. How driving home with cannabis hanging out of
your trunk is the same as announcing that there is cannabis in my home, come
rob me.
“It’s CBD.” I said, knowing that just because it’s non-psychotropic, just
because there is no local black market for these strains, doesn’t mean the
crooks know that. As soon as the words
were out of my mouth, I regretted them, because Chico hollered “THEY DON’T KNOW
THAT, you foolish woman!”
I argued that if they grew my CBD properly, like they did the THC
plants, I wouldn’t be in this pickle, but Chico was too clever to accept that
argument. He pointed out to everyone
listening that even if their CBD crop had succeeded, the sisters would be out
of leaf and bud for this moon cycle, anyway, due to the fact that it wasn’t yet
time to harvest.
“You shouldn’t yell at me.” I told Chico. “I have magical powers. Look what I did? I manifested CBD! Yesterday I had no CBD and today I have racks
of it!” Chico was scowling, so with
that, I said my good-nights and scooted off to bed.
Back in another era of my life, I consulted for newly-deregulated
businesses. Energy, Telecom, Cable. I learned back then that working in a
newly-deregulated business is much like a ride on a bull. You have to hang on tight. You have to be determined. You have to be able to roll with the
punches. If you get thrown, you have to
get right back on. Hours and days of
hard work, interspersed with moments of fun and moments of pure terror.
“This is the first batch that I have ever made that I am afraid of.” I
commented to Sister Darcy one night prior to beginning the batch. “We must pray to rid the fear.” I said.
“Why are you afraid, Sister?”
“The stakes are higher.” I said, simply. “There is much to lose. We have stepped onto the world stage. We are being watched. People from all over the world are
re-ordering and relying on our medicines to manage pain, to help reverse cancer,
to reduce seizures. Our mistakes will
have public consequences.”
I didn’t tell young Sister Darcy what I was really worried about. I didn’t tell her my fear that the lab
results would come back upside down, that the CBD to THC ratios would be wrong,
that the batch we just invested over a thousand dollars of high quality
ingredients to make, might not cut the mustard for shipping out of state, and
then the value of the batch reduces by fifty percent, and the store gets
neglected, as we turn our energies to the California dispensaries to distribute
. . . I didn’t connect all those dots for her.
I didn’t explain that if the worst happens, it would have been better
for the goats to eat the CBD.
“If the universe wanted the goats to get the CBD,” she said as she
hugged me, “It wouldn’t have delivered it to us, Sister.” I didn’t believe her, but her hugs are sweet
and all I really needed to banish the nagging fear. It will be what it will be. And if we get thrown off the bull, we will
just have to brush ourselves off and get back on.
