The Purpose of Weeds

Photo Credit: Morguefile by Heirbornstud

Last fall, I double dug a garden bed, shaped like a triangle, and seeded it with native flowers. Perennials for pollinators—their seeds spread too thickly, in hopes of some good luck. I want a new flower bed, one riotous with buzzing bees, dancing with butterflies—a flower bed of hyssops and prairie zinnias and the magenta of hummingbird mint, crowned by the nodding heads of purple coneflowers with their yellow coronas dipping reverently to earth. Something multi-colored up against the small expanse of blue grama grass and yellow-flowered yarrow that is my front yard. In fall, the seeds set and were fortified by chills in winter, settled under snow, and thought.

In spring, I am starting to see dandelions. Purslane. Pigweed. Clover. And a leaf or two of what I think might be zinnia.

These infernal weeds! What are they doing, encroaching on my tasty soil? Wetting down the area, I sit thoughtfully, pulling—grabbing up as much root as I can. Always weeds; like the unbeckoned thought across an empty mind, the shopping list that arises in the moment of a kiss, the ad for Viagra during family movie time. Weeds with roots that won't let go, that break off leaving bits of themselves sunk in mire. Weeds that tease me "Nanny-nanny boo boo," and pop up again once I've looked away; like the never-ending pile of papers accumulating by my keyboard, ever begging to be filed; like the disappointments I put away each night that wake up with me the next morning, fresh as if I've never told them to be gone. Weeds like the flaws in my very nature that spoil the pretty show I hope to make. I do the therapeutic work of yanking at them, then covered in dirt, I come in to teach my child about ecology.

This subject is my favorite; the science of sacred wheels. Nutrient cycles. Carbon/oxygen cycles. Food chains. Food webs. Life cycles. The world breathlessly passes energy from one hand to the next—from seed to mouse, from mouse to snake, from snake to hawk. The hawk's body decomposes on the earth, consumed by tiny organisms, made food by saprophytes, and it becomes a source of nitrogen for the tree that bore the mouse its seed. For me, a biology textbook is no less than the holy word. I speak as if in church: "photosynthesis." Everything has its purpose inside Nature—to maintain or restore balance to the system of which it is a part.

Purpose. These weeds in my holy triangle are there, of course, because I invited them in, by heaving up the turf and turning soil, disrupting vast colonies of microscopic life, turning in compost, and leaving the earth bare in wait for plants that would come later to a home I made for them. In moved the nitrogen fixers, to do the magic of making sugar out of air, the dandelions—bringing up nutrients and moisture with their deep tap roots. The earth, eschewing the vacuum I've created in a small pocket of her world, has gifted it with exactly what it needs to be healthy—the mother's milk of disturbed land. She will turn it, if I leave her, into forest, eventually: fixing nitrogen, stabilizing soil, holding moisture, creating a home for shrub-land then eventually for trees. It will never need to be watered or fussed at or fertilized. It will take care of all of that itself. And feed the pollinators, too. When will I ever learn?

Lying in bed with the thoughts I pull like weeds, I wonder what is their purpose. Are they out of nature, unholy, things to be cast aside—or are they instead the ugly nursemaids of my own nature, bringing up, from the deep, faint echoes of a source of truth I may not want to hear? Resentment, sadness, regret—seen in the correct light, are these not the pioneer plants, only first in succession to the restoration of a disturbed piece of mental land? Pull them out again and again and they come back, still trying to fill the emptiness that is always left behind. What courage and stillness would it take to allow them to spend their time, bringing life back to a damaged corner of my heart? To trust that later would come fuller plants, the shade of trees, the singing of birds—a system that was whole again?

Sometimes, I can feel the rightness of that still waiting in the bones of my mammal frame. And sometimes, that trust is too expensive and with a thrust of my spade, I dig in once more and pull out another weed.

Potentiality

Last summer's garden mid-June

You will find, now that it is the season, that I write about gardening a lot. I wrote about it a lot last year—my seeds, my soil, the inspiring mycorrhizal fungi building relationships in the earth. This has inspired some of my readers at various times to exclaim with admiration, "I garden too, but not so masterfully as you!"

Were any of these readers to visit my home they would find a woman whose counter is covered with bowls of soil and testing equipment, the maps of carefully planned garden beds, their crops all rotated from years before. Gardening books and notes are heaped upon the table. Ah, yes, they'd think, she really knows her stuff. But then, at length, they might notice that I have grass growing into my perennial beds and that my catmint is wilting, desperately in need of division and re-planting, which I keep putting off. They might notice that my Russian sage has spread its suckers and is taking over the world of soil within its grasp: an empire of unwanted xeric plant.

In the backyard run chickens, next to pieces of sodden cardboard I once thought I'd use for sheet mulching, and are digging themselves dust baths in what once long ago was turf; there is another garden bed next to dog poo, an abandoned light-saber and one single dessicated unmatched child-sized sock. The home of a master gardener is probably not the description that would come to mind. The usual comment is something like, "And this is legal here?" with a nod to the chickens and ducks.

Yet they would sense that my yard has the potential to be wonderful. And that is what I'm masterful at: potentiality.

I took a course some long years back—a seminar of sorts—in which we were asked to write down all the commitments that we had, everything small and large that we had a vested interest in bringing forth into the world. My list was longest, and so I won. After having done all this and stewed on it a bit, seen the commitments we had, which we hadn't acted on yet, and gotten all inspired by the largesse of our hearts, the seminar leader then informed us that we could easily winnow down our lists by considering them thus: the only things we were actually committed to were the ones we were acting on.

I find I often think of this. "You don't have a commitment, Tara," I hear the seminar leader say. "You have a fantasy."

If anyone is insulted on my behalf, they needn't be. I have, in the twelve intervening years, failed to bring one single thing into being from that list that I was not already acting upon then. I have not built a geodeosic dome or started raising dairy goats or become the leader of a seminar myself. And I have come to accept this commitment/action business as the gospel truth.

My life has long run like that list that I made when I was twenty-five. Become a writer. Get a career. Save humanity. Run a half-marathon. The noise and distraction of interests, like commercial breaks, which run across the screen that is my brain. What, I have been asking myself lately, is the program? What is the purpose? What is the desire? What unity is the rest of it all there to serve?

The answer, of course, is found where my hands are already dirty, in the evidence on the ground. It seems I want to be a student. No matter what I am trying to do, I surround myself with books. I experiment, my face streaked with soil as I mix test units to find and record the level of phosphorus, nitrogen, potash. I like to teach only because I'm learning as I go. In the yard, full of chickens with mysterious ailments and psychological quirks, seed beds ready for planting, years of experiments to try, I find my purpose, something worthy of my life.

Conversely, the pretty, kept-up house and yard I dream of will probably always remain a fantasy, as I walk by the sock yet one more time on my way to pick up a chicken in my arms.

Bones in a Bag: the Reduction of the Human Soul

Photo Credit: by T.Voekler Wikimedia Commons

On my kitchen counter: a half-gallon of vanilla soy milk, two cookbooks, an empty cup for coffee, a naked paper towel tube, and rodent bones in a bag.

I pour myself the cup of coffee, pick up the tube and, looking through it like a telescope, wonder about voles. An interesting fate, that—to have ended up inside an owl pellet carefully wrapped inside tin foil, crowded together with the skeletal remains of other voles. Then to be slipped into a plastic sleeve and stapled together with a minute magnifying glass and plastic forceps, sold as a hands-on element in a literature unit on Poppy, a book which has no voles.

Much later, after waiting all winter in a drawer, to be found, in pieces. "Oh, yes! Here is a complete skull!" Vertebrae choked with digested grey fur laid out like beads in a row, alongside slender ribs like tiny Cs which opened their jaws too wide. A jawbone complete with yellowed teeth, hipbones like odd spatulas. "Look, honey! It's a vole!"

This vole is old now. Its great-great-great-great grandchildren have probably already been raised and have bred and are now, as we speak, being consumed by hungry owls. The vole is archaic. Alive, he'd be a relic, a Civil War re-enactor in the streets of the lively now. He could tell us tales of the ways voles used to live—the simple, idyllic days of vole-ish harmony that went before. Instead, though, he's been scraped off my counter and placed carefully into a sandwich bag.

I am forced to wonder: what would I be, once reduced to my components, laid bare and labeled according to a chart? This metatarsal laughed uproariously at The Big Lebowski, no matter how many times it saw the movie—it just laughed and laughed aloud? The third vertebrae up loved lilacs. The lower mandible made Christmas cookies with its children every year. This rib cage, intact, provided the nurturance that raised three sons with all its heart.

It seems ridiculous, to be so reduced. And yet we do reduce each other. Right down to the bones.

I had, this week, a most unsatisfying set of conversations with some of the staff of my son's school. It has been difficult to put my finger on what was so insidiously soul-sucking about these exchanges, why they felt like entering a strange land in search of allies and leaving instead at war. Looking at this bag of bones, I know.

In the reflected words of the school counselor, I felt myself made small as the spit-up vole—felt my heart picked up and examined, laid down and labeled; one word applied, unsaid but loudly shouted, for all the fierce love for my child, my desperate desire to see the world do right by him:

"Difficult."

And so the label will be stuck. Ranks closed, rude politenesses were offered, the smug certainty of barely-restrained scorn was held in check until the counselor could get off the phone and tell a colleague what a pain in the ass this woman was.

I am sorry that it went that way instead of how I hoped. I look in this bag. Bones, devoid of flesh and meaning. Devoid of motherhood or fatherhood, absent context—swallowed and spit up. I do not know this counselor, whether she is a mother, whether she ever lost a child. I do not know the mistakes she thinks she made or the wars she is fighting to preserve the children placed under her charge. She is nothing to me but the woman who is treating me like a problem while I am trying to help my child.

Perhaps I will write her a thank you note. Or, perhaps, I will just remember that I know less of her than nothing—her name and her title, as meaningless, after all, as old bones in a bag.

March: Stealing Spring from the Jaws of Death

Winter, for a minute, stole spring's coming; freezing the lazy grass sudden-stopped in its swaying, now formed in erect swords of ice; dusting golden straw with the paleness of death. Hanging in stillness, the birds held their breath and waited to exhale the notes that would herald the warming joy of things stirring deep beneath the earth. The song buzzed within their throats.

I also waited, forced by tyrannical lists to action, covered in sweaters—aching under barometric pressure, which kept rising and falling like the regimes of tiny, fleeting men, living out their negligible lives in the time it takes to SNAP.

Business was done while frost lingered on the grass and yellow crocuses poked out their faces in the sugaring of snow. Inside, we swept and mopped, just as if the world wasn't changing its mind and changing it back again, a titanic two year-old into which I must soon set my seeds.

The cat hid underneath the couch, afraid of being placed into the cold. Ducks padded carelessly and slept upon the ice while chickens hid inside their coop, afraid to set their tender, forked feet onto the frost upon the earth.

Southward trees trying to flower were, perhaps, crushed in their efforts and summer will bring us the dearth of their fruit. Perhaps.

But March, like an old friend, holds no surprises for me. We will freeze in winter jackets, cast them off and stand in t-shirts in the 45 degree blaze that feels like summer, praising God in the highest, singing Hallelujah, our feet half-sunk into the mud. Snow will fall again and we will photograph tulips as they stand tall against assault.

For what is spring without winter? Just the unearned laughter of the neophyte who has known no hardship, dressed in blossoms never threatened by the chill.

We, in the mountains, steal spring from the jaws of death, and it lasts half a moment before summer rises and crushes it with its blaze. The blossoms we wear are dear as gems.

Spring, in fact, may never come again, and so we beat our fists on snowfalls and looks for robins in the March landscape—barren, full of skeletons, and promising of hope.

A Tragedy of Cruelty

There, in the yard, was one hen on top of another. Poor baffled Ostrich was underneath. In the wash of high hanging sunlight—the exploding sudden goldenness that told me spring was near—Henny Penny was pulling her feathers out. "No!" I bellowed. Tossing down my purse, a violin, a folder full of music and a hoodie belonging to my son, I rushed into the fowl yard and extracted Ostrich from the fray. Where before there had been a blackened lump, a purplish cast, now there was the addition of missing feathers and fresh scabs from the assault. My mother, ever at my aid, picked up Henny Penny, gently admonishing her while she looked with deep and skeptical attention at the people in her yard.

"I've got it," I told my mother, with the abrupt voice of sadness sticking in my throat. "You can go ahead and take Mikalh and go."

She did.

I took the hen from my mother and carted her off to the isolation of her former yard, where the little house she'd lived in with her water and food containers still remained. I set her down. As I filled her water and food, she looked at me as if to ask why I had removed her from her flock. Chirruping long and disturbed chicken noises, she paced about the area. I refused to really look at her. I made sure she had food and water, bedding and safety, and I left to go back and make sure Ostrich was OK.

Treating Ostrich's wound with saline and Neosporin, I wondered if she was damaged beyond repair. Birds are delicate. Ostrich, although bloodied, was thrilled beyond belief that her tormentor had been carted from the premises and dug happy holes in the earth of her chicken run where she cleaned herself in dirt. Her two gentle friends did not pick at her. All day I watched them through the window, every few minutes, terrified of the chicken instinct to go after anything that bleeds. No one hurt her. She chased insects in the dirt. Henny Penny, in her separate yard, paced like a panther, calling out loneliness I could not answer, in the universal language common to all things that have a heart.

It was 6 PM before I realized I'd left my purse and the violin outside and never picked them up. So troubled by cruelty and tragedy I'd been, I'd left them in the yard.

A week ago, the news reported some teenagers in our town doing something horrible and cruel, bullying another child—another child with autism. A video of what they'd done had been posted on Facebook. The local news added hyperbole to tragedy, telling us, "The video shows just how far teenagers are willing to push the limits," while my own teenager watched in horror.

It haunted me for several days, both the outrageous act and the commentary on adolescence that surrounded it. So much noise. Noise and anger. Comments calling for children to be locked up and hopes that they'd be raped in jail. So much anger. So much screaming and chattering and commenting and generalizing and carrying on.

So much that you'd almost forget that someone's child had been penned under another, still with fear as his feathers were pulled out, his flesh sundered, his soul bruised raw. So much noise you'd almost forget the howling universal cry of loneliness uttered by some children who society didn't know how to look after until they did real damage to someone else. Maybe more than one someone else, before they were caught. In this small town, we saw these kids grow up and no one knew what to do about them. Now they will be half-grown villains, when before they were only children without love.

This horrible transformation seems to me one of the most tragic, and perhaps personal, things of all.

My little red hen paces her yard, calling out. I have no words to explain to her why she has to be alone. "It's your own fault," I tell her. She looks at me and looks at the other chickens, and she starts her keen again.

I leave her there and go back to the three sweet hens, where I sit on a chair by Ostrich and watch her pecking, breathing in her happiness and freedom from tyranny, as I sit kissed by the spring-struck air.

If You Give a Chicken a Muffler: A Lesson in Cause and Effect

Here is Ostrich Ventress, the subject of my tale

If you choose to acquire a naked-necked chicken, when it's winter, you will wonder if her neck is cold.

If you wonder if her neck is cold, you will begin to find yourself neurotically checking her neck every day to see if it looks cold.

If you check her neck every day, one day there will appear black markings on the neck and you will decide that the chicken has frostbite and is probably going to die.

If you decide that your chicken has frostbite, you will Google "chickens" and "frostbite."

If you Google "chickens" and "frostbite," you will find pictures of roosters wearing hats, accompanied by comment threads explaining how certain women put hats on their dear little chickens to protect the combs from cold. "Good idea," you will think.

If you find pictures of roosters wearing hats, you will post a request on Facebook that your friends knit your naked-neck chicken a muffler. "Sure," one friend will say.

If you ask for a chicken-muffler on Facebook, you will become impatient and, while you are waiting, you will cut up an old, black sock that belongs that your youngest child. Then you will snatch up the frostbitten chicken and wrestle her to the ground where you will place the sock over her head and scrunch that sucker down.

If you put a black sock onto your chicken, the dominant hen will go berserk. She will think that you have replaced her nice, docile little friend-chicken with a vicious, dangerous, black-necked cobra-chicken and she will chase it madly around the chicken run, trying to peck out its eyes. Feathers will fly everywhere.

If your top hen goes berserk, you will be forced to put a diaper on her and bring her in the house while you are trying to teach math. "Forget about the muffler," you'll tell her. She will walk into the kitchen, where she will helpfully peck out all the crumbs she can find hidden in various cracks.

If your hen is in the kitchen pecking at the tile, you will start thinking that you should take that sock-muffler off the other hen. This is going to get ugly, you will think, and so you will head out to the chicken run and pull that black sock off.

If you pull the black sock off, the next morning you will find that the frostbite is really a hematoma the size of a large grape, swollen and disgusting on your naked chicken's neck.

If you find a hematoma on your innocent chicken, you will panic and return to the internet.

If you return to the internet, you will find that hematomas are self-limiting but must be covered and so—you will go and get another sock. This time you will choose a white sock, in case that makes a difference to the murderous hen.

If you put a white sock-muffler on your chicken, the next morning you will find that she has partially unraveled it and that there is a loose string encircling her tongue, which is magically connected to the moist surface and inextricably joined together with her flesh. The bird and the sock, essentially, are one.

If you find a string wrapped around your chicken's tongue, you will spend the next twenty minutes extracting it, all the while apologizing profusely to your bewildered if docile bird. Finally, and with scissors, the string—and a small part of the tongue—will come loose.

If you free your bird from a tongue trap, you will abandon the idea of mufflers altogether and you will place your bruised and baffled chicken in the yard, where she will thoughtfully eat lettuce and forget everything you've done.

If you return the chicken with the hematoma unprotected to the yard, the next morning you will go out early, very nervous—and look carefully at her neck.