Remembering Holidays

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Memorial Day is an important stepping stone to get through the capitalistic year.  Not only does it mark the unofficial beginning of summer, it’s also the first holiday after the long, long drought of March, April, and nearly the whole month of May.  That’s a long stretch of unbroken work.  My ideal holiday may be one where I could hole up in my study with books and endless time to write, but that kind of situation isn’t really realistic.  There’s a lot to do.  Around these parts, however, getting outdoors to take care of those weeds has proven difficult.  Every day since last Tuesday (nearly a full week, as of today) it has rained at least a little.  Sometimes a lot.  And the temperatures dropped on Wednesday, back to early April levels, as if May were vying for the title of the cruelest month this year.

We’ve been making the best of it, getting out to see local attractions while dodging raindrops.  The weeds, I’ve noticed, love this kind of weather.  And I have a visceral reaction to putting on a heavy jacket to go out pulling weeds while watching each passing cloud for a potential downpour.  On the plus side, we have rainbows.  In fact, two nights in a row, about the exact same time, near sunset, we had a rainbow in the exact same spot in the sky.  That’s a sign of hope.  And indeed, the summer takes on a more relaxed atmosphere at work and a few holidays start creeping back in.  Until the stretch of September-October, the second annual drought.  But by then, however, off in the distance I can see the holiday season that starts in November and I know I can make it through to December.

It’s an odd way to live, isn’t it?  Experts talk about how work will be different in the future, but I have a mortgage due in the present, so I step from holiday to holiday, grateful for the time to recover.  With a government trying its best to eliminate benefits to seniors I may have chosen a bad time to reach my sixties.  At least I’m young enough to still pull weeds and push a mower.  (Once the grass dries, that is.)  The main point is not to waste this rare gift of a holiday.  There’s no rain in today’s forecast (but there is for Wednesday, every day through next weekend).  Seeing the sun buoys me up.  And if I can’t have that I can always hope that at least I can have rainbows.

Hopeful Flowers

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Our front yard is a bit of a wreck this year.  You see, none of us are natural gardeners and with two chronic illnesses among the three of us we’ve had some multi-day hospital visits and shifting of priorities.  The front yard hasn’t been one of them.  I’m able to get out around 6 a.m. on a Saturday, however, to do some weeding.  My philosophy this year is that if it’s not something people would consider an “ugly weed” and if it stays under six inches tall, I’ll let it grow.  We’ve planted some deliberate ground cover that doesn’t seem very deliberate, but it’s slowly taking hold.  And, of course, there are the ubiquitous dandelions.  I don’t really have a problem with dandelions but others think of them as weeds and they do, admittedly, have no sense of personal space.  They’ll grow right up under some intentionally planted flower and crowd it out.

If you’ve dealt with dandelions, you know they have deep roots.  Well, it rained yesterday and the ground was soft enough that I was actually able to gentle one out the whole way today.  It was impressive.  Usually the root breaks off (a brilliant, if frustrating adaptation) less than an inch beneath the surface.  I thought to snap a picture before tossing this one on the compost pile (in the back yard, of course, inside the fence where it can’t be seen).  Talk about depth!  These yellow wildflowers with edible leaves and wine-making potential, are tenacious.  They have a very strong will.  Dandelions are perhaps the most strong-willed of plants.

With chronic illnesses, hope is essential.  Instead of getting angry at “weeds” I look at them as examples of just how mighty hope can be.  They find cracks that are so small that we overlook them.  The soil can’t always be great there, but they carry on.  Dandelions can reach impressive sizes (trust me on that one—I’m no gardener) and they don’t take “no” for an answer.  Such resilience gives me hope.  Were they more conscious (I’m sure they are at some level, but I surely hope it’s beneath the threshold of pain degree) they might well be dominant among the plants.  I missed mowing the lawn last weekend for being in the hospital with family, and it’s clear the dandelions have designs on taking over the place.  I see them and I find a deep peace.  Life finds a way, in spite of difficulty.  

Tyranny of Plants

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Notwithstanding what I wrote yesterday, there is a tyranny of plants.  Specifically those which make up lawns—in my case, mostly weeds.  A friend recently reminded me that weed is just a name for a misplaced plant, and I confess that I’m fine with weeds but neighbors may not be so open-minded.  Non-conformity is still a virulent stigma.  If an observer from outer space were to observe us during the spring and summer, they might well conclude that we were in the service of our yards.  The irony here is that yard care is perhaps the ultimate sign of success.  You have really made it if you can keep it neat and trim.  And you’ve excelled beyond that if you can pay someone else to do it for you with their tractor full of buzzing implements.

Because I’m concerned about fuel consumption, we purchased a reel mower when we bought our house.  I never mowed the lawn as a child.  First we rented, and when a stepfather came into the picture he didn’t let the kids mow.  (It wasn’t to be kind—it was a control thing.  If he saw a snake he’d race across the yard to dismember it.  More than once I’d be out playing only to find snake suey, with flies.)  College at Grove City involved carefully manicured lawns done by others, and after grad school we lived on campus at Nashotah House where the students cut the grass.  From there it was back to renting.  In other words, I never had the opportunity to learn how to mow lawns.  My lines aren’t straight, and I’m tempted to sneak out at night, when the grass is high, and leave crop circles at which the neighbors might wonder.  I don’t like being a slave to plants.

The reel mower is like pushing the grim reaper in a baby carriage.  Or at least it must seem so from the perspective of the grass and weeds I call my lawn.  The suddenness with which constant lawn care becomes a major concern has tightened my focus on the fealty we owe to ground cover.  We’ve had a break from the rain for a couple days and after work I find myself pushing that mower like a deadly thurible, releasing the scent of newly shorn grass.  Our particular town retains the right to fine those who let the grass get too long.  As I go along cutting back both grass and weeds indiscriminately, I wonder at the biblical nature of even this.

Dandy Lions

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O great—just what I need right now.  I knew lawn care would soon become a necessary avocation after buying a house, but this I did not expect.  Over the weekend I found myself pulling up dandelions that were growing out of cracks in the front steps.  Since we compost, I laid them out on a slab, figuring when they dried out I could make them into more soil.  (From which more dandelions will grow, I know, but still it just feels right.)  I came back a day later to find that the dandelions had returned to the vertical position.  Zombie dandelions!  They apparently couldn’t stay dead.  Now, I’ve been writing about demons for the past several months and I’d forgotten about zombies.  Well, I did post about resurrection on Easter, but my short-lived digression left me unprepared for this.

Really, the persistence of life is a sign of hope.  Perhaps dead zones, such as morality in Washington DC, will someday come back to life.  There’s hope for a tree, Job tells us, even if cut down.  These dandelions were a message for me.  Don’t give up.  Prior to religion being hijacked by theology it was a system intended to make life better for people.  Human beings were more important than heretical thoughts.  You help those who need it, regardless of what they believe.  Or don’t believe.  That was the point behind resurrection, I suspect—we can rise above all this dirt in which we find ourselves.  There’s a nobility to it.  Then again, fear trumps hope just about every time.  The dandelions are rising and we have no hope of outnumbering them.  

The ancients feared the dead coming back.  It’s a primal phobia.  All those things we buried with tears we hoped would stay the way we left them.  Life, as Malcolm says, will find a way.  Politicians, it seems, will find a way around it.  Call it executive privilege or whatever you will, the end result is the same.  The yellow-headed fuzzies will threaten you even when uprooted and left to dry in the sun.  Now, our lawn isn’t pretty.  Grasses of different varieties contend with weeds I’ve never seen before for scarce resources.  I’ve never minded dandelions.  They don’t ask much, only they now seem to be demanding the right to come back from the compost.  And if we let that happen, all hope is lost.