Weed 'em and Reap

Long white ghost roots wriggle and undulate as I pull them out from under the porous black tarp. It was thrown down to kill the weeds a couple of years ago. Neighbor Bob says it never was a lawn really, only a weed patch front and back, which the former owners paid someone to mow one a month. Said they liked it. Reminded them of the wilds of Mississippi.

When the kids sold the place to us in 2014, they were counseled to put shredded bark over all. Brown is the new Green in California. So, I pull the white ghost roots out from under the bark and black tarp. Some are as stout as linguini. Some as ephemeral as fairy hair. Greens are hardy beings. They go toward the sun.

As the warm gold life-bringer dips below the trees this evening, it is finally cool enough to weed. Mind you, this is post major weeding weeding. I paid Omar and William a full day’s worth at $20 per hour per man to get out the towering thistles with trunks big as my fist, and Bristly Ox Tongue with spikey owie-maker thorns. Wild oats as tall as my shoulder got hacked at the roots too. I had done three days worth of hand weeding and got only one quarter of the yard done. The fellows did an admirable job ten bags worth to my five.

My spiritual practice this evening is to nip in the bud the wanna-be solid green carpet that these wee weedy creatures remember and long to re-establish. Life goes toward life!

Metaphors abound: What must I rid myself of? What’s gone to seed and may be growing sticker ball purrs and Mexican Morning Glories that wants to obliterate my soul?

While Bristly Ox Tongue’s flowers are a pretty color yellow, their sticker-full leaves render them ugly when my tender finger tips get pricked. I need a tool for these.

Bless Deirdre Sloyan’s generous gardening heart. She told me about this perfect weeding tool from Smith Hawken. I found one in their brick and mortar shop in Pasadena in 1990. In the shop, I meandered like a glacial meander belt stream. No hurry. Slow wandering with eyes all a sparkle at every bend around shelf ends, and at every bend of my knees to explore lower shelves. Returning to upright after one such low-down investigation of some marvelous gardening toy, I came face to face with an on-coming angel. A woman maybe fifteen to twenty years my senior with white bun and tendrils framing her incandescent face. She looks so present in her body I know at once that I want whatever she’s having that makes her so alive. Utter peace emanates from her. I begin, like a duckling following its imprinted mom, to walk in her wake. When she gets to the cash register with her purchases, before my eavesdropping becomes embarrassingly obvious, I duck round a shelf near the cash register and wait my turn in line - breathless, and in hiding. I am simply happy to have seen a mentor, a pioneer of the possible. She leaves the store not knowing that she was that for me this lovely day. Too shy to share with her my contact high.

I think of her this evening as I heft my perfect weeding tool in warning to the burgeoning Bristly Ox Tongue leaves. This is MY garden and it’s not big enough for the both of us. I wonder. What would my secret mentor do?