I spent a while in my backyard this afternoon raking, scraping, digging and picking up. The yard looks horrible but it’s a major improvement on this time last year, when there was probably four times the amount of buried (and bare) trash among the tree-weeds and plaster-dirt.
Behind the garage, there is a narrow alley of dirt-upon-leaves-upon-trash-upon-dirt. It is hemmed in by a dilapidated wooden fence along the very back of our property. Inches from the wooden fence is a wire cyclone fence on the other side, as though a single fence is not enough to delineate the boundary. Beyond that is a barren yard and driveway area belonging to the tenement-like, three-story apartment building behind our house.
While burrowing, raking, and picking up the endless amounts of discarded garbage, broken glass, and mysteriously-accumulating trash like the kitchen knives that showed up recently, I discovered some new pieces of discarded metal in this little alley of dirt-trash. They were not hard to miss, as there were a half-dozen pieces of them, and they were quite long—maybe six or seven feet, and bent in half. They looked like unwanted pieces of garage-door machinery, although there is no garage adjacent to the spot except our own.
River came out with me to look at these metal bits to confirm whether he’d put them there. He hadn’t, so in a burst of energy he took them all and carefully placed them on the other side of our double fencing, cursing to himself about what’s ours and what isn’t that we have to deal with. Silently I wondered what would be the ramifications of placing these metal bars outside of our property line. Children around us have had a habit of tossing trash (and apparently kitchen knives) into our yard, sometimes while our own kids are out there playing, but I’ve not yet watched adults dealing with their garbage this way. Judging by how much trash accumulated in our yard, though, it’s anybody’s guess how it got there.
Much of what’s left, at this point, is degraded trash bags filled with drywall. As I dig, I find more, along with whole bricks, broken light bulbs, empty bottles of liquor, you name it. I go through a whole range of emotion as I unearth these things. Denial, shock, anger, outrage, disaffection, numbness, acceptance.
Just now I had an encounter with a large tree-weed. I’ve been battling this thing for 18 months. I loathe it. Having chopped off anything I can chop off with the tools I have, I let it rest for the winter because I couldn’t easily dig it out last fall (I tried). It’s been leveraging itself against the dilapidated wooden fence, having grown up from underneath it, from the other side. It’s one of those nasty-looking, insidious tree-weeds that mocks you by sprouting leaves and twigs no matter the weather, no matter what you do to it, no matter droughts or locusts.
My encounter with it was like something Sigourney Weaver might have done in “Alien.” I made faces and sounds I hadn’t realized I was capable of. I braced myself with both legs against the fence and yanked, pulled, prodded and stretched that thing until there could be nothing left of it, and then there it still was. The roots were deep and long and multiple, spread out underneath like a head of thick ropes of hair. Finally, finally, I got that thing out of the ground, and breathless, I was ready to collapse next to it and expire my last while staring out at the blue vacuous sky.
But I came here to write about it instead. Let the record show that I killed that thing, and it’s not going to be a problem anymore.
Now for the rest of them…