Unfinished Swing

I stretched a four by four between the branches of a mulberry tree and a giant jujube I started from seed that has never fruited. I am trying to clear out space and draw the eyes of all who come on this land to what I have planted and what I want to keep growing. The four by four will hold a swing I got from my friend Dylan who lost most of what he owned during a hurricane named Ida. 

I collect too many things. I say this not from a place oif judgment, but from knowing that most of what I collect is never used. Who picks up a wheelbarrow without wheels. It’s missing half its name for Christsakes. I don’t see this in the moment. I see bachelor’s buttons and calendula flowers rising up past the rusty sides. I see the contrast of life with what may have otherwise gone to a landfill to be trampled.

Now I sit, more than a year later and nothing has been done with these crippled wheel barrows except to let them sit on the back edge of my house where they do nothing but call out to me with the desire to move. I have become the landfill. 

I consider the problem as the solution. I consider cat’s claw. That’s what they call this vine that strangles houses and drops seeds after big yellow flowers bloom. From the highway the flowers entice, they draw you in. They make you want to look closer. Or they did, before I knew this vine intimately.

In one of those green witch books I read that by burning what you do not want to return and asking kindly, letting the plant know your appreciation and the fact that she is no longer needed, will aid in the plant going away.

These witches must have never met the cat’s claw. Strange since so many pictures show witches with cats next to them. They must never have met cayratia Japonica either. Wheelbarrows are not the only thing I collect that I do not need. I’m a fan of old wood I never use and bike rims, always with the idea that I will create individual trellises that will wrap around giant pots so that wanted vines might be confined.

I want all the flowers. I want the gulf fritillary butterfly. I want the yellow moths that lay their eggs on cassia and I want those fan tailed birds that strip orange berries from the dwarf tamarillo like a ravenous cowboy setting his teeth into a hunk of stringy beef jerky. These fan tailed birds, they work hard, but this plant is another that I am okay with culling, okay with placing in different spots, where other plants will not grow.

To have clear vision I start with the dried vines of the cat’s claw. I add small dry twigs to the broken wheelbarrow and light these on fire. I want the vine to feed the soil. I want the vine to stop stretching and wrapping around everything that I plant.