It Felt So Productive

There was a pernicious weed snaking through the garden bed on the side of Mom and Dad’s house. It dove long lengths under the blackout fabric before popping up. While I worked, Mom sat nearby and ate chocolate-covered giant marshmallows, looking very girlish for a woman in her fifties recovering from brain-cancer surgery. Her headband strategically covered the shaved arc of their instruments, though I can’t recall whether it was still itching her then as it grew together.

What had started out as pulling weeds became a tactical mission. This one god damned, scrappy-looking thing simply refused to go quietly. It unfolded into a production of moving decorative river rocks, searching for seams in the fabric, digging compacted soil and extracting the next sinew of this vine-like invader — which probably sounds like an exaggeration except it isn’t. It had razor sharp thorns and inexplicably tough cording. Every few inches it put a stabbing of roots into the earth, where I can only presume it melted into the bedrock because it was intensely hard to break the roots free. And whenever another plant or rock blocked its route, the thing managed to careen brazenly around it. All told, I think it must have covered six or seven feet, laid out as though a toddler drew the map.

It felt so productive. Getting at it. Rooting something out. Dirt under my nails, you know? Mom had wanted the weed gone for a while. I was doing something.

The plant had started in the neighbor’s yard and weaseled its way under the fence. There was no way to get to the base of it. Just as I’d really started to gather steam, it trailed to a wall I couldn’t cross.

I pulled as much as I could but to no avail. I put the dirt and the river rocks back and put the tools in the shed; Mom went inside at some point. It seems naive to have hoped it was gone from our yard for good, but that is the way cancerous things work. You bend your back to change them until you recognize that nature will not ever bend for you.