It would be an overstatement to say that I play the ukulele. More accurately, I own a ukulele. I even took lessons at the amazing Old Town School of Folk Music in Chicago. We moved to Indiana right after my first series of classes so I didn’t get a chance to become the ukulele virtuoso I aspire to be. So far my search for local uke lessons have been futile. Of all the songs we learned in class, Princess Pupule, an old Tin Pan Alley song that’s about a woman who loves to give her papayas away (full of innuendo), was my favorite.

When I saw a papaya tree at a local nursery I snapped it up so I could pay tribute to Princess Pupule. We enjoyed a lovely first summer together and I successfully over-wintered Mr. Papaya and I stuck it out again last summer. I had it in a cool container full of well-drained soil. I didn’t often water it because we had Northwestern Indiana’s first ever monsoon season. I stuck it in a nice hot spot in my back yard and mulched the container it was in with my humongous collection of broken terra cotta pots. Sigh.

It just died last week, rotted out, and it’s not just mostly dead—it’s dead for real.

 

It looked really cool, way cooler than the photo. This photo is like memorializing a person that died by displaying a portrait of only their leg at the funeral. I didn’t know it was going to die and that I’d have to write its eulogy so soon. I would have snapped a (somewhat) nicer photo.