Buena Fog

The fog was the first thing Saga noticed every morning, before she even opened her eyes ~~ the way it cooled the round window above her bed by maybe one degree, and the way the light through the stained glass came in not as squares of red and blue but as something dimmer, like the colors had been weighed down by water. On thick-fog mornings she could lie in bed and watch the room go from dark gray to light-gray to greener-gray, while the sun up there over the cloud forest tried to decide whether to show up at all.

Today the wall was greener-gray already.

Spring, she thought, with a teenager's official disapproval. Spring is coming.

Bet, she thought. Which roughly means "Yep" in La Charla.

Spring is coming and Papá is already up and Mamá's outside working the plantation and Sirius is going to come up the ladder in about ninety seconds, poke his snout through the trap door, and casually pretend he's looking for something.

Eighty seconds, in fact. The trap door creaked. A black-and-white snout pushed it the rest of the way open. Sirius looked around like he didn't have an agenda.

He heaved himself into the loft, performatively sniffed around like he was looking for something, then made a deep grunt as if to say, "Well, since I'm here I might as well say hello." He jumped on the bed and nuzzled down beside her.

"Buen dia, knucklehead," she told him.

She rested her hand on his head and watched the wall for another half-minute. Up through the trap door drifted the smell of coffee ~~ real coffee, the peaberry coffee from her mother's plot down the hill, fresh ground that very morning. Above the coffee, there was a thinner, herbal smell, which meant her mother was already back from the terraces and was up to something with fennel.

Saga gave up.

"Vale," she said. "Vamos." Okay, let's go.

She pulled on the wool socks her grandmother had knit ~~ the Swedish grandmother, who knit at a rate that suggested the world was going to slip into another ice age at any moment, and who had sent, in the last year the mail still came, an entire crate of them in sizes climbing toward a granddaughter she would never get to measure. Saga had worn her way up through that crate her whole life. She put her bathrobe on over the t-shirt she'd slept in. The bathrobe was the spa-resort kind: terry-cloth, enormous, embroidered with the word Bienestar in big swoopy cursive lettering that once must have cost somebody a lot of money. But they were all over the island ~~ Mateo, her Dad, brought five home from the market in El Fraile two winters ago. There were whole crates of them. Saga liked hers because it was enormous, and because bienestar ~~ Spanish for wellness ~~ was on most days pretty accurate.

She climbed down the ladder and into her parents' lives.

Their kitchen was a single room shaped like a big kidney bean, a fireplace built into a curve of plastered stone in the years before el silencio, when Querencia de los Helechos wasn't quite a village, but instead a restful, artfully designed forest coliving where people came to relax, make friends, practice yoga and hike the cloud forest trails until the wet season rolled in. A small fire was crackling in the fireplace because Mateo believed coffee tasted better in the warm glow of a fire, and her family came to share this sentiment.

Mateo was at the end of a table, made from a single laurel slab, badly varnished, but deeply loved ~~ in his own Bienestar bathrobe, hunched over a little black beat-box synthesizer, the size of a portable game system from the 1990s. He held the stylus in one hand, a cup of coffee in the other, and that small frown he got when he had a tune by the tail and was trying not to drop it.

"Buenas, mija." Mateo didn't look up. "¿Ta come?" (are you eating?)

"Ta," said Saga. I am. Which was true!

"Bet. There's pan en la mesa, gofio en e bol, y mantequilla de GOAT. Mamá brought a basket of fresas up from the lower plot."

Bread on the table, gofio in the bowl, butter from the little Canarian goats and a little wicker basket of strawberries beside it.

"¿Fresas en april?" said Saga, sitting. Strawberries?

"Achamán is favoring us." He said. Achamán was the sky-god the indigenous Guanches had worshipped before the Spanish showed up with their Catholic saints. Mateo looked up briefly, smiled, then looked back down at his beatbox. "Either that, or the season is just two weeks early. I'll leave the theology to your mother."

Saga pulled the bowl toward her. The gofio was warm ~~ Linnea had set it on the back of the stove before sunrise and left it under a cloth. Toasted barley ground half-and-half with the dried starch of the ferns that grew everywhere up here. Helechos. The village had taken its name from the ferns; Querencia de los Helechos. The yearning of the ferns.

She stirred in a spoon of goat butter and a splash of milk, still faintly warm from the morning's milking, and a small pinch of salt from the wooden dish on the shelf. The cereal turned a deeper cream and smelled like a nutty, toasty forest.

She poured herself a cup of warm milk spiked with coffee from the dented copper pot on the stove and a spoonful of tuno syrup stirred in. Tuno was the prickly-pear fruit that grew on every sun-warmed wall in the village; boiled down into a sweet syrup.

She sliced and set two strawberries on top of the gofio so the heat would warm them through, and ate slowly.

The door opened with the soft heavy sound of a door that once belonged to a stable. Linnea came in. She had mud halfway up her boots, a bundle of green leafy plants in her arms; her two braids had been tidy at four AM and were no longer so tidy. Over her overalls she had on the marigold-yellow sweater her own mother had sent in the last year the mail still came ~~ the one with beautiful green worked into the cuffs, that had survived everything Linnea had put it through, which was a lot. She had the expression she wore on mornings when an irrigation line had done something interesting in the night and she'd spent forty minutes fiddling with it before sunrise.

"Helvete," she said. Which was Swedish for damn it but Linnea said it the way other people said good morning.

Saga, who had learned this word at four, looked up. "Buen dia, Mamá."

"Buena fog," said Mateo, without looking up. It was the island's highland greeting and also a joke in their household, because Linnea disliked the fog and Mateo had never stopped teasing her about it.

Linnea set the green bundle on the counter ~~ a kind of mustard, bitter, that Saga liked grudgingly ~~ put a cold hand briefly on the top of Saga's head as she passed, and crossed to the kettle. She smelled of fennel and damp earth. "It's this watering system," she said. "I had two ideas about how to fix it, and they're both wrong." She poured herself a cup of coffee, leaned on the counter, took a sip and closed her eyes for several heavenly seconds.

"Did he do the trap-door thing?"

"Ya," said Saga.

"Pretending he was looking for something?"

"Ya."

"Hijo de la Aurora," said Linnea, fondly. Son of the dawn.

She fetched Sirius's bowl from the shelf by the hearth, ladled a scoop of gofio into it, broke an egg on top, and poured over a splash of yesterday's broth from the pot on the stove. Sirius materialized at her elbow with the studied calm of a creature who did not wish to look hungry. She set the bowl down on the warm flagstones. He applied himself immediately to eating it; it disappeared in three noisy slurps and a final lick ~~ in case anything had escaped his enormous floppy tongue. Then he turned round twice in front of the fireplace and curled into a croissant of black and white, the satisfied way well-fed dogs did in the morning.

Linnea sat at the table and pulled the bowl of fresas toward her. "Achamán is favoring us. Or the season is two weeks early."

"I just said that," said Mateo.

"Then we're aligned." She ate a strawberry and paused. "The coffee trees are already flowering. Most of the plantation really. It's going to be a good harvest."

Saga looked up.

The peaberry coffee trees were the only ones on the island, and Linnea's plantation was too. She'd started it eight years ago with a handful of seeds a Croatian visitor carried over from Yemen. The handful had quietly sprouted and over the course of four years became three bushy coffee trees. And finally ~~ two seasons ago ~~ they produced nearly six precious ounces of green coffee. Linnea handled them like a sleeping child. Mateo roasted them on the wood stove, unlike you would (I hope) a sleeping child, but with great care. The three of them tried it one Sunday afternoon, Saga's cup mostly warm milk with just a spike of coffee. They sipped it quietly at first, like the coffee might vanish if they breathed wrong ~~ and then somewhere around the second sip Mateo started laughing, because it turned out the coffee was just coffee, and very, very good! From then on they'd all been laughing about it and agreed it was the best they'd ever had.

Over eight years, the rest of Linnea's permaculture work had been quietly handed on. The papas (potatoes) went to a Romanian family on the lower terraces who'd turned out to know more about spuds than even Linnea did. The cebollas (onions) went to the three Cebolla sisters, who had grown so consistently good at onions that it had become their name. Ajo ~~ garlic ~~ was supposed to be impossible on Tenerife but at Querencia de los Helechos, it thrived for reasons nobody had figured out ~~ the ajo just kind of looked after itself. And Linnea, year by year, became the island's one and only coffee farmer. The plantation was the result. Some forty trees, planted out from those original three seedlings.

This was the year the plantation was going to really start producing. If the broca stayed off. The broca is a coffee junkie beetle, it burrows into coffee cherries to raise its family.

"How many beans this year?" asked Saga.

Her mother glanced at Saga. "If they all produce," she said, "and if the broca stays off, somewhere between five and ten kilos. Enough for about 1400 cups of coffee." That meant a year of Sunday coffee for them. A year of Sunday coffee for Tía Anna, who hadn't stopped talking about the test batch the day she'd tried it. For Margarethe in Santa Cruz with her one working espresso machine. For the community village kitchen. And as a valuable commodity for trade at the island's farmer's markets.

This year, when somebody on the island said coffee, they were going to mean Linnea Björk.

Outside, in the direction of the workshop, the cantenna tower ~~ Mateo's mast of salvaged potato-chip cans wrapped in wire that somehow talked to the rest of the island ~~ made a soft click as the old steel frame settled in the warming sunlight. Inside, a chime rang from the weathered old laptop on the desk, the cheap, dumbed-down kind of laptop public schools gave kids for homework before the collapse. A text message appeared on screen:

Then, slowly, the text message began to download.

"That'd be Anna," said Mateo, without looking up from the beatbox.

"How do you know that?" asked Saga.

"I was up at her house yesterday, she asked if you could bring some of that zarzaparrilla root we collected last week. The root beer. Said she'd send a reminder."

"Why did you not just tell me before the message."

He looked up at last, wearing the small open expression when somebody else had walked into a joke before he'd finished setting it up.

"Because then you wouldn't have heard the chime and known what it was for. It's.. technology." He returned to the beatbox. "You know, kind of an educational thing."

"It's.. insufferable," said Saga.

"Same thing." He pressed the stylus against the screen, considered, pressed again. From the box came the first three notes and something that was unmistakably a series of kicks, snares, and a wobbling bass note beneath. Dubstep music.

Saga put her face in her hands. "Papá. No."

"Sí, Papá sí," said Mateo.

"Dubstep is abuelo music, Papá. Grandfather music."

Mateo twinkled at Saga with a grin. "Es clásico," he said, with the dignity of a man defending his taste. "I danced to this when I was young and dangerous."

"When? The Pleistocene?"

Linnea huffed a short laugh through her nose, and then, without looking up from the strawberries: "Approximately."

"Es sus," said Saga. I don't like it.

He smiled, and pressed the stylus a third time.

BRRRRR--WUNGA-WUNGA-WUNGA went the beatbox.

Saga gave up and stood. "I'll find the zarzaparrilla root," she said. "Then I'll go up to see her."

"¿Va sube?" You're heading up?

"Va sube." I'm heading up.

Mateo nodded the way he nodded at most of her decisions: with the approval of a man who had stopped being surprised by his daughter's initiative. Linnea, who had not stopped being surprised, looked up.

"Take her two strawberries."

"Bet." Okay.

"And a loaf of banana bread. She doesn't eat enough."

"Okay, Vale."

She went to the back room ~~ the cool one, with shelves cut into a nook where her mother kept the things that didn't need a fridge to last a week ~~ and found the bundle of zarzaparrilla roots her father had collected for her. She put them in a basket along with a loaf of sweet banana bread. She added two strawberries, popped a third in her mouth.

Sirius rose from his place by the fire, stretched from front to back, and shook himself out from nose to tail. He yawned loudly, with the long vocalization of a large dog announcing that it was time to begin his duties.

The fog was lifting. Through the round window above the kitchen, the green of the slope above the house was visible in patches: the silver-pale leaves of the laurisilva forest, the mat of pine needles on lichen-covered lava rock. From here she couldn't see the neighbors, but she could hear the morning sounds of them: somebody hammering wood, somebody else laughing, the fountain splashing, and the low voice of one of the Cebolla sisters telling a cat to please, for the love of God, come down from the roof.

She stepped out, basket in both hands. Sirius trotted after her because she was carrying banana bread, and never let her go up the slope to Tía Anna's alone if he could help it. He had concluded, at some point, that accompanying Saga was his responsibility, and she enjoyed his company. The path went through the upper terraces, past the goat stable, and around the old metal tower, where three potato chip cans pointed at different angles and, on a still morning like this, made a very small humming sound of tiny packets of digital information transmitting across the island.

She hummed back at them, then she went up the hill.