By Hand
The weeds have found their opportunity—small narrow crevices where the wooden sides of the raised beds don’t quite meet the edges of repurposed cardboard boxes flattened out and placed all around each bed like sashing on a quilt top. Greenery I don’t know by name is pushing up with Herculean determination, ensuring I’ll still have my gardener job when the sun comes up tomorrow. I could harvest the kale, of course, but two people can only eat so much of that in a week before we’d buy more shares of the company that makes Imodium. Between planting and harvesting (and we’re talking weeks-sometimes-months) it’s all about the weeding.
We do own a gas-powered monster affixed to the end of a two-handled pole designed to lay them out flat in a blink, and watching Patrick suit up to use it brings to mind a climber preparing to ascend Everest. I’m sure I’d enjoy its efficiency, but I grab my stained leather garden gloves and an old kitchen throw rug (to use as a kneeling mat) and flex my fingers as I walk the distance between the mudroom door and the scraggly-fringed boxes that hold our hopes for pasta sauce and chutney.
The quackgrass and plantain had best put their affairs in order.
Like running confidential but no longer useful documents through a shredder, there’s instant gratification pulling weeds from the ground. I know they’ll return, and I don’t have any delusions about one day being unemployed in my gardening role that way. But I can clear a patch by hand in less than thirty minutes, cover the bare earth in cardboard or grass clippings or a cartful of old straw from the barn and feel like I’ve earned the right to sit outside with a glass of Cabernet in my hand, showered and smelling better before dinner. It’ll be a while before a tiny shoot of something bright green shows itself again, and with the tan dried grass as contrasting background, I’ll spy it and pluck it out by the roots. The soil will let it go easily. Another glass of Cabernet please.
It’s also rhythmically meditative, kneeling on the ground (I mentioned a mat but that’s truly optional), the scent of good rich dirt reaching my nostrils as I rock back and forth tugging at a tenacious plug of tall fescue. I learn patience at the feet (rhizomes?) of a plant whose only crime is location. My goal is the same; I simply adjust my time frame to accommodate this tender battle of wills . “Winning” is redefined, and humbly so, especially when I have a go at it without my gloves and a rough-edged blade of grass slices my palm like an office paper cut. The nearby cherry tomatoes will be grateful for the absence of competition for water and sunlight, which in the garden is the whole point of being down there on my knees in the first place. While I’m in that reverent position, my thanks drift upward where two mature bald eagles catch a summer’s day thermal. No amount of gas-powered convenience could have matched the glory of that now-indelible image.
I know you know this already: in our “gotta-have-it-now” existence, convenience trumps quality, and we’re in such a hurry to get into the Next Important Thing, we don’t look over our shoulders to see what we might have missed. I’m as caught up in it as everyone else most days, but when I choose a slower path to get where I want to go, the rewards always—always—exceed the fleeting satisfaction on the other side of speed. It’s the difference between a plate of buttery sautéed fiddlehead ferns and a Cup o’ Noodles (artificially flavored with “shrimp). I’ll wait while you decide.
As my recent vacation transitioned me back to work, I’d left one rather large to-do list project unfinished—reorganizing my studio. A collection of various media for creating quilts and hand-bound books and beadwork and watercolors had wildly outgrown their respective containers. I plunged into it with great energy the first day, disgorging cabinets and storage totes of their contents, sorting by type and color and even age. By the second day, I admitted defeat, grateful I could close the door against the disarray until I caught my third, fourth and fifth winds. I’ve been chipping away at it since, discovering rare and discontinued cotton prints, bits of sparkly vintage jewelry, and a half-finished hand-embroidered panel depicting a seashore scene with sand-colored beads painstakingly sewn to a scrap of upholstery fabric one at a time. Who was I when I started these projects, and who have I become since putting them away for another time? Clearly, it wasn’t about production line assembly or speed. I have a sewing machine and I love it, but there are some things that just do better with the touch of a patient and dream-filled hand. Tending to the weeds indoors, I whispered to myself.
Theres no convenient work-around to that, no gas-powered puce if equipment to flatten it in a blink. Not one that I’d trust, anyway.
