Michael D. Davis.

To say my sister and I have the occasional fight is an understatement. To say that she’s Muhammad Ali and I’m George Foreman, that could be a more accurate statement, but our rumble in the jungle is filled with quick-witted barbs and sarcastic comments. The ironic part is that usually we get into these verbal sparring matches via a lack of communication.

For instance, yesterday, we went to Walmart. Ma went to the eye clinic for an appointment and left me and my sister with a list. At the front door, the two of us split up, both of us having separate items that we wanted to get. We agreed that after getting our items, we’d meet in the plant section, as Ma wanted us to get some flowers. Nothing could go wrong.

I walk from the front door straight back to the office supplies. I turn down an aisle, I grab the sticky notes I want, I swivel back around without having come to a stop, and immediately head to the plant section. When I arrive at the indoor part of the plant section, the garden area, I wait. I do not see my sister. My thought is that I would wait for her there instead of heading to the outside section, as I am an asthmatic allergic to flowers, and it was a warm day. On the off chance that she beat me to the plant section and was now waiting in the outside area, I quickly did a loop outside and then went back in to wait.

Now, I do not have ADHD, but I am not one to stand around and do absolutely nothing. For example, I almost always have a book with me. Instead of reading as I waited, I first answered a few texts, then looked about the area. I looked at the seeds, who knew that carrots came in any other color than orange? Then I thought about getting a pickaxe because they’re cool. Then I looked at the wide array of rakes that were available, and that astounded me about as much as the purple carrots. Of a regular rake, there are mainly three sizes: the normal size, of course. Then you have the double wide, apparently for those who have to clear a hillside in two sweeps. Then you had the small, or shrub rake. It was ridiculous. It was a rake head as wide as my hand on a four-foot broom handle. It made no sense.

By the time I was done admiring the rakes, I realized I’d been in the plant section for about a half an hour. My sister was still nowhere to be seen. So, I texted her. She says she’s in the plants. That made no sense to me because I’d been there the whole time. I look around, and don’t see her. I go to the outside section, and there she is among the flowers. I asked her how long she’d been there, and she said about fifteen-twenty minutes. I was flabbergasted.

We started to get into this whole argument next to the perennials. I said she couldn’t have been in the plant section that long, because I was on the inside part. She says I couldn’t have been waiting that long because I wasn’t anywhere to be seen. The thing is, I knew when I got to the plants, because I stopped and answered a text. The text came in at 2:51 p.m., the time of our fight was 3:17 p.m. I had been on the inside part of the plant section for exactly 26 minutes. Of course, this did not end the fight, and I stormed off and read my book on a bench next to a trash can for a while.

In the later fight and examination of the incident on the drive home with Ma, a few points were made.

My sister never thought I could have made it to the plant section as fast as I did.

No one but myself considers the inside garden section as part of “the plant section.”

It made sense that I stayed inside the store since I am an asthmatic allergic to plants, and it was a warm day.

The fact that the two of us got into a fight should have probably been foreseen.

We were both idiots for standing around for a half an hour, not realizing that we were waiting for each other. Ma pointed that out.

My current theory of what happened is that I got to the plant section first. As I was looking at the rakes, my sister walked past me without noticing me at the rakes, and went outside. This is backed up by the fact that later in the Walmart trip, my sister asked me if I knew where Ma was and if she was with me, oblivious to the fact that Ma had been more or less following her down the aisle for the last ten minutes.

Either way, it was all more or less forgotten about when, on the ride home, my sister used the word “sawn,” when she meant to say either saw or seen. You can’t pass up an opportunity to joke about something like that when you sawn it.