Today I was out in my yard harvesting weeds and trash. It’s quite a therapeutic process. I dread it, and then once I’m engaged, it’s hard to break away to do anything else. There are aspects of compulsion involved… the sort of thing where I spot a weed and start pulling and then notice a million more like it… and I get into a trance like when I am playing a video game, or driving, or typing something up from paper, where I’m not thinking consciously anymore, but I’m letting my brain react to some other level of noticing and doing, and I’m in the zone. It’s amazing that pulling weeds and hacking at hardened earth with a massive rake can be like that. I notice the sore muscles later. In the moment, nothing else matters.
The weeds I’ve been pulling are insidious. They take root from quarter-inch bits of themselves. They also break easily. Fortunately, they are easily recognizable, and they like to grow tall. Their leaves are greenish-reddish and the stalks become hollow after the things grow, say, six inches. So they’re kind of like bamboo or rhubarb. They grow plenteously and aggressively. A single foot-long weed root snaking underground can sprout seven or eight eager new plants. I have to be out there vigilantly searching for new ones every other day or they get to be a real hassle. But once I pick a new little sprout, inevitably it breaks easily (part of their clever design), leaving part of itself behind to try again later (typically mere minutes or hours after I have given up trying to dig it up).
When I tire of weed-pulling I can turn to landfill maintenance. This entails plucking up shards and panes of glass or raking around masses of pillow entrails, plastic doll heads, rusty railroad spikes, plastic container parts, and sundry other household goods at varying stages of decay.
Over the last few weeks I have spied a number of small hosta lilies growing up among the crumbled drywall mixed with soil in two main areas, one along the outside of the garage wall, and the other along the back fence where the drywall and trash are at their worst. It’s remarkable that these hostas can come back under such conditions, but then I realize that the conditions are markedly improved over what it must have been like last year. These hostas have a lot less to compete with thanks to a ton of sweaty weed-pulling last July and August. All the same, better to give the hostas a respectable place in the yard, partly to make an area I worked hard on look a whole lot nicer, and partly so I can dig the heck out of the areas that still need major overhaul without gingerly working around the precious plants.
So I transplanted the hostas and arranged all these huge granite chunks of rock along one fence, where the soil looks relatively healthy and the trash has been mostly ferreted out. There are earthworms in there, and they seem round and juicy, which is always a good sign. In went the hostas today and they look all the happier for it. I tried to do this thing where I gave them each their own space but not so much that they would feel lonely. Do hostas have feelings? I do wonder.