This afternoon, I’ve been digging a hole in the back yard for Miss Hought. That’s what she insists on being called, even though she’s a widow twice over. She has the idea that because of her roles in community theater, she’s some kind of star. Everybody around here does know her, certainly. She makes sure of that. But I don’t think it’s so much for her performances. Her performances on stage, I mean.

I’m digging a hole for a grapefruit tree this time. The tree, special-ordered from Neil’s Nursery, leans against the fence, root ball wrapped in burlap. It has come here to die. It is the latest in a series of condemned citrus. Miss Hought has had me plant lemon trees, orange trees, one lime tree, and a tangerine. Sometimes one or two trees has managed to come through the winter alive, but usually we have three or four hard frosts in the Willamette Valley, too much for trees like these.

The folks at the nursery always try to talk Miss Hought out of citrus. “If you want fruit, how about pear trees? Or cherries?” But Miss Hought says that if she keeps planting, what with climate change, one of these days her little back-yard grove is going to take. At least, that’s what she says in spring and summer. Come winter, you’d think it was Miss Hought dying with each frost. Ask her in February, and she’ll tell you that she always thought Junction City was no place for citrus.

Ours is a town that grew up on hope. The founders nicknamed Junction City “the Chicago of the West,” figuring that between river and rail, we’d become the hub of western grain shipment. Junction City, population five thousand and a few odd. Miss Hought and I are a couple of the odd. In summer, she thinks she is Chicago, but in winter she knows she is Junction City. It’s my job, a non-paying job, to get her through these personal booms and busts, the Chicagos and Junction Cities of her soul.