Tag Archives: weeding

Reading in shade

It’s the time of year when, according to the lunisolar calendar, we move from 小暑 xiǎoshǔ–when the heat begins to get unbearable–to 大暑 dàshǔ, the hottest time of the year. It may also be the greenest time: my garden suddenly plumps out huge squash leaves, giant sunflowers, masses of beans, zinnias, basil. The tomatoes are finally burgeoning after a late start. It’s too hot to spend much time weeding and pruning: I harvest what I can and retreat to the shade as soon as possible, where I can read.

A friend recently lent me a book of short stories, Human Sacrifices, by María Fernando Ampuero, an Ecuadoran writer. It’s been ably translated by Frances Riddle, and the stories are startling and harrowing. Not something to check out for a light summer read on the beach, but memorable and thought-provoking. One critic says Ampuero’s work is South American gothic. I don’t agree–and I think it’s kind of a cheesy shortcut in a review–but perhaps that phrase does convey the flavor of some of her stories. Anyway, it’s always a treat to find a writer whose work I’m unfamiliar with and whose work is admirable.

I’ve been taking a break from reading poetry, though that wasn’t planned on my part. July brought a wedding, a death, and some travel; and now, in the intense summer doldrums, I prefer to read for entertainment or information, or just to pass the time. Poetry takes more brain and heart space for me, more “intentionality” or concentration, than most non-fiction books or novels do. This is not to say any other genre is less demanding in and of itself. It’s a personal quirk: I am more attentive when reading poetry than I am when I read other forms of literature, probably because I’m unconsciously (or consciously) endeavoring to learn something of the craft and style and context of poems by other poets. It’s a method of processing how to write poems. But as I have no plans to write fiction or non-fiction, I read such genres for entirely different reasons.

Usually I try to read outside on the porch, in the hammock, on the garden swing. Some days it is just too damned hot and humid, though, and I resort to the air-conditioning indoors. The indoor climate has no flies or gnats but also no bird songs, cicada hums, cricket calls, breezes, scents of summer. Indoors is less than ideal (except in the teeth of winter!).

Recently I’ve added a shade garden where the chicken run was in decades past, under the umbrella of our largest white oak. I haven’t yet added a bench, but a lawn chair suffices for now. Alas, it is a bit buggy, but so is the hammock. The pleasure of summer reading in shade outweighs the inconvenience of the minor fauna…most of the time.

Crabgrass

I have been at work in the vegetable garden during the past few dry, sunny, late-summer days–it has been rather droughty here–and pulling up weeds in an effort to get an early start on putting the patch to bed for autumn. I have decided not to do any late-season sowing this year, and therefore I can pretty much tear up everything if I feel like it. Today I was thinking about my mother-in-law, who died in 2017, but who was sometimes my partner in the garden, or I in hers, when we were younger. I learned a great deal about ornamentals from her.

At her property, crabgrass was a particular scourge. I remember us weeding flower beds together while she muttered, “Crabgrass! Always crabgrass, how I hate it!” It struck me odd at the time that she pronounced it “crebgrass,” with the first “a” like a short “e”, because she said the word “crab” and similar words with an open short “a.” It was almost as though she reserved that pronunciation to express her ire at this particular weed. She liked weeding at my house partly because I had so little crabgrass. Plenty of other weeds, but not much crabgrass.

Our weeding together took place over 15 years ago, when my gardens were on the new side, maybe a decade old. Today, however, I find my vegetable patch very much colonized by digitaria sanguinalis…one of the finger grasses, a very successful weed that can produce 150,000 seeds per plant. My garden now hosts both smooth and large crabgrass; the former is much easier to pull, though it can set seed even when it is mowed to under an inch in height! Large crabgrass, when it gets going, can grow over a foot tall and have a base rosette of 10″ with a star-like (or crab-like) set of leaves and quite tenacious roots, for an annual.

While I worked (too late, I really should have gotten to the weeds long before they began to set seed), I heard my mother-in-law in my mind: “Crebgrass! How I hate it.” Well, dearest Gene, I have finally encountered the Eurasian colonizer in my own gardens. And I miss having you around to sympathize with my plight.

 Maudib | Credit: Getty Images

There’s a metaphor here, I know there is. Maybe there’s a poem in this experience, too? For the time being, pulling weeds reminds me of someone I loved–and takes my mind off of another person I love, whose dwindling and decline (her “diminishing”) stay uneasily in the background of everything I do these days.

In the between-season time, with autumn almost upon us, I want to remind myself of the joys that come along with the crabgrass. Such as the brown crickets and the morning glories and the goldenrod…and memories of people for whom I have cared a great deal.

~

Helpless

The weeding continues apace. I no longer do a clean rake-up of the gardens in autumn, because I now know that bees and other creatures overwinter in foliage debris; but it is imperative that I get the worst of the vines and perennial invasives out of the beds. We had a bit of rain recently, so I went out to claw and pull. Underneath the spreading Japanese maple, I found this:

~

At first, I thought I’d found a fungus. Upon poking, I realized it appeared to be sections of a paper wasp nest. Hmmm. It took some craning of my neck and crawling much further beneath the tree, but there it was–the remains of a paper wasp hive dangling above me. Certainly it looked unoccupied, but I crept out from under the boughs just in case.

Under the tree, and twined throughout the flowerbed, I found quite a few sumac seedlings and plenty of poison ivy vines. Sumac and poison ivy are native plants, not invasive species like loosestrife and wintercreeper, but I don’t fancy having them in my perennial gardens. More yanking will be required soon.

~

At least I am doing something that, while rather disheartening–the weeds will always come back, weeding’s as endless as housework–keeps me moving and outdoors and occupied so that my mind whirs around less. It appears I’m weeding as a coping strategy while my mother continues to spiral toward whatever is next for her. Hospice care. Death. The inevitable, with the unknown “when”.

What bothers me most about her situation is how helpless she has become. My mom endured some childhood traumas, times when she truly was helpless. She learned to find and deal with her anger, with trouble and conflict, with physical pain, but she hates feeling helpless. And over the years, her inherent pragmatism and stubbornness, as well as her patience and a little emotional counseling, have served her well. I can only recall once when I saw her feeling helpless (and only briefly). It rattled me, but I was also impressed by how quickly she regained emotional equilibrium and took a small action toward…well, toward not being helpless.

And now, she is. Helpless, I mean. She cannot speak, feed herself, walk, or even sit up unassisted in bed. The prognosis for her recovery is so-so. She may manage to regain a little self-sufficiency. Or not. After all, she’s 91 years old.

The paper wasp hive seems like an analogy to me. When it has served its purpose, for all that it sheltered its denizens so well, it rattles apart, breaks down bit by bit, no longer resembles itself. Helpless in the wake of another winter coming on.

~

My father never cared for Neil Young, didn’t like his vocal delivery. But my mom heard the Déjà Vu album over and over in our house when we were teens, and she liked it.

~

Poem-ish thing

I don’t really feel ready to write what’s on my mind today. I do appreciate the cooler weather that means I can mindlessly pull weeds from the perennial beds and the vegetable garden without sweating or sunburn. Here’s a spur-of-moment poem-ish thing to mark, for myself, the place I’m at.

~

All morning, redtails shriek overhead
pleas or threats
or just announcing their presence
they don't much care 
how I interpret them.
I don't interpret them.
Listen only for brown crickets,
whirring cicadas that have begun
to wind down late in August.
My father died in an election year
77 days before he could have
cast his vote. I'm reminded of that now,
how distracted I was and how,
though the election mattered,
my father mattered more.
For most of us, what's near the heart 
obscures other concerns. Look:
there is dew on the grass,
barn swallows have 
already left the garden.
~

Useful avoidance

Trapped inside with the air conditioner on for over a week, I sat by my bookshelves going through the poetry books in my library. I’m re-reading, assessing which books I truly want to keep because I turn to them often or learn something each time I read them, which books I keep for sentimental reasons (maybe I know the author personally), which ones to keep because they are signed copies, which ones are long out of print and I would never be able to replace them. Some of them remind me strongly of places or eras in my life: I bought this one in a small bookshop in Grand Rapids MI, or this one at Barnes & Noble when it was just one store on a NYC street corner, or these at the storied and much-mourned Gotham Book Mart or St. Mark’s Bookshop. What are good reasons to keep books when I really have to downsize? It’s not an easy task, and the first of many in the process of getting rid of stuff so my kids won’t be stuck doing it. Besides, I enjoy re-reading these books. My children are not as enthusiastic about poetry as I am, so it makes sense that someone who loves the works on the shelves be the one who makes such decisions. It feels good to be surrounded by the words of wonderful writers when the outdoors is brutally hot and humid, and every joint in my body aches.

Surrounding myself with other people’s books also acted as one more way of avoiding my own creative work. Sometimes, though, waiting around and doing nothing on a project ends up bringing clarification or new ideas. It can prove useful. I have been stalled on my in-progress manuscript, so a month or so back I asked someone to take a look at it–and then I got caught up in doing other things. Like getting cataract surgery and having covid, and then it was gardening in full swing under sweltering weather, and then the bookshelves… I wasn’t exactly procrastinating, but neither was I actively working on, or even thinking about, the collection.

Acquired when I was much younger, and cool bookshops abounded.

And one night recently–during a much-needed rainstorm–I got a brainstorm! I realized I was trying to pack too many topics into what really should be a manuscript more closely focused on how people who love one another vary in their relationships to old age and death, and on how the contemporary social and medical aspects of the aging process pull us in uncomfortable directions, often distancing us from those relationships. So yes, there should be family poems, hospice poems, biblically-influenced poems, and dealing-with-everyday observation poems. Also some poems of hope and love, poems reminding me (and readers) of the need for compassion in all dealings. But the draft had 92 poems in it, far too many; and some were there just because I like them or they’d been published in a good journal. Which are actually not good enough reasons to include a poem in a collection, according to most of the editors I know.

I am back to thinking about the manuscript and digging up potatoes–a nice crop this year–instead of culling the poetry books because, thank goodness, the heat wave’s subsided a bit. But in the process of this non-routine summer I have allowed numerous weeds to flourish and set seed; all the more work for NEXT year’s gardening, but it’s been too hot to deal with said interlopers. I like to believe the weeds and I are reaching a sort of understanding, but it is not really a compromise. All the concessions have been on my part. [Note: weeding a personal library is less physically taxing but not really any easier.]

Back to the garden

Late spring weather, mild and pleasant; lettuce and spinach ready and quite tasty, strawberries, asparagus–all the early harvest, with mulberries ripening on the trees and tomatoes starting to blossom. I have weeding to do, and it’s a task I don’t mind when the weather cooperates. Later on in summer, when the days get humid, hot, and blazing–then I am no fan of weeding. But on perfect days in early June, weeding is one of those mindless puttering tasks I can attend to while half-daydreaming.

I’m thinking about task-oriented work and creative work as opposed to wage-based work thanks to Jenny Odell’s second book, Saving Time: Discovering a Life beyond the Clock. Weeding’s one of those forms of work one does when it is necessary–the time it takes, and the best time to do it, don’t conform to clock schedules but to environmental ‘schedules,’ which vary. Too rainy? I don’t weed. After the soil has dried a bit and the weeds are sprouting like crazy? Time to weed. Too dry and hot? Not time to weed. Yet if I were a wage-paid groundskeeper and my boss said, “Get weeding today, $14 an hour, don’t waste your time,” I would have to weed, to look busy, to keep busy. Even though it might be a poor time to accomplish that particular task.

I’m no longer on the clock, at least in terms of wage-earning, but that socially-ingrained urge to keep busy and accomplish things and meet deadlines? That’s hard to move away from. Ill with covid, I kept complaining to myself that I wasn’t accomplishing anything. By which I guess I meant housekeeping, gardening, laundry, cooking, submitting work to journals, making plans for summer events, visiting my mother, taking walks, going to the gym…but really, it’s rather strange to think of such things as accomplishments. They’re not even work, per se, just tasks. They don’t have time constraints; doing them only becomes necessary when I run out of clean clothes, or need to eat or harvest spinach before it bolts.

Odell later addresses the sort of care-giving work that can’t really be broken into wage-based tasks, though industries do try that. Nurturing children, caring for livestock, being a teacher, social worker, farmer, artist: sure, some people do wage-work for these jobs, but hourly accountability doesn’t suit such work well, tends to distort the varying needs of the moment and the fallow or less-busy times that are just as crucial to accomplishing “good work” as the more rushed times are.

An artist needs down time. So does a Certified Nursing Assistant. So do farmers and teachers. And parents!

…and gardeners. We have all winter to do less and plan more, and then we have to respond to the weather and the circumstances around us as the circumstances require. Warming trends from climate change, floods or droughts, invasive beetles, viruses, weeds. What cannot be changed must be adapted to; didn’t we learn that from Darwin? If I have a job, as far as the garden goes, it is learning to balance things so that my effects on the earth are sustainable, harming the earth’s balance as little as possible–providing for pollinators and birds and amphibians, and also for my family.

It’s a difficult task and not clock-measurable, but more rewarding than most jobs are.

~

Because I like this song, and Mitchell’s lines about being billion-year-old carbon and getting ourselves back to the garden, here she is:

~

There & back again, with weeding

I have traveled to the American Southwest and back again, over a fortnight away from the humid valley where my gardens languished toward autumn, pounded by rain, while we were gone. For two weeks, we lived among the terpene-scented (pinene, not cannabis…though we did notice cannabis when in downtown Albuquerque…) environment of the Sandia Mountains, where humidity is “not a thing.” I embraced my beloved family members, not quite often enough to make up for the distance between us, but enough to feel contented for awhile. And we explored some of the northwestern/north-central parts of the state that we haven’t seen before and were awed. I have not yet tired of the geology there. It’s easy to imagine New Mexico as the benthic floor of an ancient sea!

En route home, we encountered flight cancellations and re-routing, which is practically to be expected (our checked bag arrived 20 hours after our arrival in Albuquerque, also not an unsurprising development). I hear many complaints about air travel these days. I may even have added to said complaints. While it may feel almost as inconvenient, unreliable, and uncomfortable as traveling by Conestoga wagon, you must admit it’s much faster–even if it doesn’t seem that way while you’re waiting for the bus to the economy long-term parking lot at 11 pm. If my beloveds had taken Horace Greeley’s advice in the 1850s, I might never have seen them again. So, I am grateful. Even to American Airlines.

~

Upon a (slightly delayed) return, I found that the valley in which we live had experienced considerable rain but mild temperatures; as I expected, the garden weeds were thriving. Some of that is fine with me: annual weeds can go crazy in October and I don’t mind. But the perennial vines, little shrubs, and weedy biennials and perennials? I dig those out in fall, along with the tomato vines, sunflower and corn stalks, and amaranth plants. That has been my job upon my return; and the cooler weather, with soil moist from all the rain, has been a boon. I have to admit that adjusting to the lower elevation and the higher humidity has put some strain on my ol’ body. But we did a good bit of hiking and walking in the Sandias and Bandolier and Jemez, so I was somewhat prepared for the workout.

My beloved doesn’t understand my enthusiasm for “putting the gardens to bed for winter.” It seems like boring, hard work. Yet I don’t clean everything up–I always leave cover for bees and other creatures that need leaf litter and old stems in order to winter over. However, taking down the stalks and cutting back the peonies (etc) feels satisfying to me. I work in the cooler weather and sense the difference in the air. I recognize the annuals are dying and the perennials are going dormant, the trees let go of their coloring leaves; walnuts, oaks, and hickories seem to fling their mast upon the earth with every gust of wind. There’s nothing sad or somber about the changing of seasons. Winter must arrive in order for spring to do its thing. I like to think of daffodils, muscari, and irises huddled quietly in soil and taking much-required rest before the warmth unthaws the earth. I feel the same.

Mindlessly

There are some necessary but mindless tasks that I’m good at and don’t mind doing. Weeding, for example (unless it’s raining, or disgustingly hot), or cleaning a bathroom. My morning chore today entailed removing staples that fastened carpet underlayment to the floor. There are dozens of these staples stuck in the subfloor, and most of them have bits of foam-like fabric wedged in them. The edges of the room are studded with tacking strips–annoying to remove when one is not a professional. Best Beloved and I did consider hiring someone to replace the floor, but since it is a job we can do ourselves…well, we have the time and are doing it.

There’s a difference between the mindless and the tedious. I don’t care for tedium; but a task I can mindlessly manage–something physical, but not too demanding, without a lot of surprises I need to problem-solve–those projects can be almost relaxing. When weeding, my thoughts can wander. The job is so familiar and repetitive that there is no need to devote much brainpower to it. Ideas, reflections, observations, images can float aimlessly in my mind. I can think about poems while weeding. Taking a walk in a woods or quiet countryside offers me the same sort of internal/external environment.

Proofreading was like that for me, back when I was a proofreader (when there were such things as proofreaders in every newspaper, type or print shop, publishing house, ad agency, and legal department). Editing takes some thought; but the less engaged a proofreader is with the text, the better. I was employed as a proofreader when I first recognized that I was truly serious about writing poetry, and I found value in the ’empty mind’ that my workaday job fostered. There was a bonus in that sometimes I did glean new information from the materials I read.

~

Composing this post, it strikes me that “mindless” is the wrong word, or not an accurate word to convey what it’s like to feel internally occupied while the physical body’s doing something else. “Reflection” implies more stillness. Something more akin to walking meditation?

At any rate, I can hope that the weeding and staple-removing might eventually get my poetry mojo re-booted. I have to work on my next manuscript and continue to promote my latest book, too. In the meantime at least I’m accomplishing something.

~