Sammi LaBue

Harvest Season

There are only a few weeks in Colorado that are truly green, and we had lazily arrived into them high off the backyard grow Trey had sown in March. He told us not to touch it before he properly trimmed and cured it, but while he was at work we greedily pinched at the buds—tiny ecosystems of forest moss—and microwaved them to dry them out before returning outside to sit in the early morning rainforest dew that transported us from our lives. Maybe it was the high, but it was also the wet grass. Colorado was so often dust and dirt, rock and clay, different variations of the same brown theme.

I was a full year out of college, Mike years away from high school, which he had fought his way to the end of, and we still had “bad jobs.” Dishwasher. Barista. The kind of jobs that make you available before noon to get loaded. But we also had this dark celery forest, this Bavarian cream cloud above, this split pea smoke to laugh out into each other’s faces.

As Trey’s best friend and Trey’s girlfriend, this was the only thing we did together. It was the only time we talked to each other. And we waited, each time, for the lighter to spark.

We were usually only connected by Trey, by our address (Mike had been “surfing” steadily on our couch for months), but now we were connected by these fleeting green days. I told him how I sweat brewed coffee onto my butter-silk sheets. He told me how he’d find pale avocado grime in the oddest places after work—inside his ear, the back of his knee, between two fingers.

Trey had a real job that had bloomed out of a real internship. He had a lunch break, and a salary, and even a holiday party. He’d only had the job for seven months, but you could tell in the silence between the smoke whenever we mentioned him that Mike and I both worried we would lose him. Not just to the job, but to the world.

When the end of summer came Trey was disappointed in his yield—imagining the birds had flown away with it. He’d managed one jar and babied it to smoking quality.

The three of us smoked “the first” joint on the front porch—the leaves turning early from a dry September. We’d stolen the green, from Trey, from the world, just so they might keep us a little longer.

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A Brooklyn-based writer and educator, Sammi LaBue is the founder of NYC’s Fledgling Writing Workshops. Some of her other creative work has appeared in Buzzfeed, Slate, Literary Hub, The Offing, PANK, and elsewhere.