weeding

Photo by Thomas Stephan on Unsplash

To anyone else it’s “baby greens,” but this one is the embarrassed red of a drying wine stain on a dress of virginal satin. Intentionally short-nailed fingers, already caked in damp earth, plunge into it’s bed of soil, deftly twisting a stalk of crabgrass at it’s base to loosen the roots determined to keep it here and spreading. Already this patch has woven itself around the lettuce sprout, thick arms reaching to the sides to interlock, a rapidly thickening carpet of pale bluish green leaves and blushing stalks. Impatience tore the leaves but left the roots, raw stumps surrounded by green confetti. Grass is nothing if not determined to grow; it is the most common variety of plant found everywhere in the world, even in the desert. One by one the fingers grip, twist, rock the young crabgrass plant out of its soil bed. Filament roots come up in a mass, reluctant to part with the dirt they cling to. Divots appear all around the baby lettuce head and it begins to lean, it’s own precious anchors loosened in the effort to give it space to grow. Overhead, thunder rumbles a warning from a sky thickening with rain shadows.

An old Tupperware container, faintly stained by more than a decade of the colorful sensory rice it had held, rests empty and upright on a shady patch of grass. The small wad of paper it catches should look lonely in the large space, but it seems to take up more than it’s quarter-sized mass can account for. The wad is joined by another, and another. They come slowly but surely, stained by ink and tiny drops of rain that sometimes mix and bleed. The paper, small sheets with a graph of black lines on the back, is the kind reserved for grocery lists and To-Dos, and to contain the brain-vomit of worthless ideas dragged from the foundation of an imploded temple. Sheets crumple as soon as the pen stops, flashes of God and Father, Eve and snake, authority and man, woman and punish. A few turns into many, then a pile. Irony is the choice of clerical white papers that crumple to reveal the prison bars on the back. But this time…this time it is the words that are locked up. Beside the bin, a black cauldron mug nestles in a bed of violet greens, offering up sustaining sips of a dark brew redolent of friendship, hope, and Divine inspiration. A journal sprouting soft leaves carries new words now: good, Mother, trust, body, Know, love, Be. Freedom is a sigh like thunder beneath a crying tree.