Behind the Ironic Column

I don’t smoke any more – in fact I never really smoked much even back in the day.  I never could remember to carry cigarettes with me, which is a sure sign of non-addiction.   And people who come to visit me don’t smoke either – well some of them do, but not when they’re here.  So I was a little surprised to find an empty cigarette package on my balcony, nestled down in the branches of a somewhat decrepit chrysanthemum which has overwintered but just barely.

It’s not an ordinary cigarette brand, and I grew up in North Carolina and Virginia so I’m well-versed in the varieties of cigarettes.  It says it’s Natural American Spirit – the box is quite attractive.  It’s a nice aqua color with black and red letters and a logo featuring a Native American with what I assume is a smoking pipe.  Comes from Santa Fe and claims to be only the finest of natural tobaccos.  No reconstituted sheet tobacco and no processed stems…  Now I haven’t read the fine print on a cigarette pack in ages, and most of it is taken up with health warnings anyway, but I don’t remember this kind of claim on our more traditional cigarettes.  Nor do I imagine my chain-smoking relatives caring too much about such information.  Usually the only brands with extraneous comments and declarations of goodness were the menthol ones which advertised how “kool’ they were.  I smoked those as well – now that I think about it. 

Anyway, my interest in this box is more related to how it got into my flowerpot.  If I still lived in my house, I’d suspect the squirrels.  I suspected them of everything and they were usually guilty.  But I’m in a fifth floor apartment and, while there are squirrels out in the trees, none of the trees touch my balcony and I don’t believe they can get here.  So not them.  My regular visitors are Anna’s hummingbirds and chickadees.  Neither of them would smoke, nor would they carry a package up here just to be carrying it around.  A jay or a crow might possibly do that, but they’re not usual visitors to my space. 

So I have to conclude that a person caused it to get there, but even that is a little difficult to imagine.  The balcony is somewhat recessed and I don’t think I could drop something into a balcony below mine if I deliberately tried to (besides why would I even want to).  I have dropped things completely accidentally over the side, but they went all the way to the street below (luckily when there was no traffic).  I don’t know exactly when it got there because it wasn’t obvious till I went outside – being hidden inside the plant.  During the cold and rainy seasons, I usually only go out to replenish the hummingbird food – so that pack could have been languishing there in my flowerpot for several days. 

It’s a curious thing – and made more  curious because the pack, while empty of cigarettes, did contain a shiny penny.  Evidently to make the box heavier – so maybe they were doing some kind of target practice.  There are several floors above me and I’m not planning to go knock on doors to ask if they lost something.  I’ll just continue to wonder if it was a sign of some kind – and if so, what does it mean.  One should pay attention to pennies dropping from heaven, even if they are wrapped in cigarette wrappers.

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