Weeds

(I spent about fifteen minutes on this so far. Should I submit it to "The Tower Light" tomorrow? I think they're hard up and will take anything.)

I was probably six or seven, maybe younger, there was popcorn in the field across the road, or maybe it was sweet corn in the garden, but my dad said something about the weeds. The corn needed to be cultivated. The cultivator dug between the rows of corn--turning the light brown crust to soft and black and smelling like earthworms. With every swipe the cultivator made the field became uniform--straight green rows on a black background. There were a few places where the planter had overlapped itself on the headlands, rows intersected perpendicularly making little green-walled squares. The cultivator took care of those squares. It removed the corn that wasn't in the proper row just as easily as the rest of the weeds. I'm pretty sure that at this time I thought weeds were anything that didn't grow in the row. I also knew that dandelions were weeds, but that also made sense because lawns were supposed to be green, and dandelions were yellow. Corn fields were supposed to be in rows. Weeds are not. A "weed" then was something that didn't look good.

A few years later my mom decided to plant wildflowers in a bare patch out by the road where the tough-skinned grapes used to grow. She bought a canister that looked like "Comet" toilet bowl cleaner, but instead of powdered cleaner it was full of tiny wildflower seeds. She shook them out randomly on the soft watered soil and surprisingly just the next morning thousands of little tiny two-leafed plants mad the black soil look green and fuzzy.

This was when my questioning really began. My mother, excited by the unnatural success of her "wildflowers," was crushed when my father muttered something like, "well, that was a complete failure." When I and my mom asked why he said, "we'll never know whether what is a weed or what isn't and what will look pretty and what won't." Mom said it didn't matter. I asked what a weed was.

There was also the time when half the box elder tree fell off in a storm (leaving a bunch of flammable dead wood). This happened the day before my older brother went to his homecoming dance. I remember because there is a picture of him standing in front of the fallen limb in a suit wearing a tie that looked like a fish. I also remember a remark my father made. It was something like, "Oh well, I shoulda just cut that tree down a long time ago, I mean, it's just a weedtree." I asked him what a "weedtree" was.

Well, as far as I can tell, a weed can be anything. (Yes, that includes people and ideas.) What a weed is depends entirely on context. It depends on desirability. It depends on me. My mother has made flower arrangements out of the blossoms of the king of weeds: the thistle. We plant and nurture sunflowers in our garden, yet we have to cut them down before the birds eat the seeds. Where I grew up, if you let your sunflowers go to seed in your garden, all the farmers for miles around remember it just so they can know who to hate as they try to get all the sunflowers out of their fields for the next four years.

There is something inside me, though, that really hates weeding. I don't mind the physical labor. I don't even mind adhering to the arbitrary aesthetic judgments that value rows to randomness and the monochromatic to the multitonal. Following conventions, I can handle. It is easy to be the hands. It is making those judgments--and being put in the position where deciding what is a weed and what is not--that is exactly hard, difficult, even unbearable, and what I don't want to do. In writing they call it editing. Some places they call it downsizing. In religions it's called converting. In romance it's called dating.

I call it weeding.

The ground is fertile, and I am tired.