Weeds

Who left these on my porch?

I read that torpedo grass was introduced by the Army Corps of Engineers to keep the levees stable. Then somebody introduced nutria, a big fat rat that looks like a beaver and likes to eat the roots that grow on the banks of rivers. For awhile, the powers that be tried to get chefs and the people to rally behind eating these giant rats. Dr. John loved the things. He loved all that kind of meat. Called it varmints probably.

I ate my first fully ripe peanut butter fruit today and planted the seed in a pot. I considered the edges of Edgar’s and what might be done with that torpedo grass around the perimeter once I lay down cardboard and rotted wood chips. There’s always a solution somewhere in the problem.

The city started sending letters again. Both neighbors across the street received them. I await mine. The letters ask homeowners to address the height of the plants outside their homes. They threaten fines if accommodations are not made. I have received these same letters in the past. I know that the laws treat weeds differently than trees and what people call plants, and I want to understand the reasoning behind plants not getting too high.

I understand the alocasia in front of the stop sign or the way my jasmine used to make the electrical box atop the power line sometimes catch fire. I know how I felt when the neighbors knew I was responsible for a power outage.

The city wants to see likely. The city wants to make sense. I consider code enforcement. I consider the ways I have seen a man become a boy, a man sitting with all his wounds still on his blue jeans, and I know this same boy I saw in the flesh of this sixty year old man I would have never seen in the past.

The gift of cutting clear what is overgrown is one that I have known. It is akin to a shower after three or four days of camping. I wonder about the balance between the two extremes, for I have seen staples pop against the weight of hard plastic in boxes built to make sure no other bits of nature enter.

There is a story of a man whose loincloth was being eaten by mice. The people told him that he needed to get a cat. He listened. The cat ran away because the man did not give him enough to eat, so the people told him that he needed a cow so that he could have milk for the cat. The man got the cow and this cow had needs beyond the man’s capabilities, so the man hired a cowboy to take care of this animal. That man needed a place for his family.

So you have this man who wanted a simple life with only a loincloth now surrounded by so much more.

I want to find the relation between the loincloth and myself and my neighbors and the city, but this story is misplaced. So I will tell you about how I came back to town today and found a couple dozen trowels on my front porch. 

Perhaps each trowel represents a different plant, a plant that might be pruned and easily defined, separated from weeds, not something that would grow too high.

I will finish with this. I met Michael Weed today. He is 64. For 40 years he has attended plant shows. His own father was at the first plant show at City Park. He wears a special shoe  and said he can no longer bend and what he would need me for would be to load and unload plants on the days of shows.

Mosquitoes bit my feet inside his greenhouse. I wondered if I was meeting myself forty years from now or if I was meeting my son after he turned sixty-four. I did not know that I would see in this man a way of seeing myself. I did not know that by caring about his past I would care about my own future.

He told me I could sell some of my own plants. He said he would introduce me to everybody. Perhaps this is what is next. Perhaps this is the way my world unfolds. Perhaps in March of next year I will sell pitanga with Michael Weed and I will get to know more people.