206. Weeding – Hollynn Huitt
Photo: Hollynn Huitt
Where would we find the time to fix this? There was only enough time to keep things running in our lives, never enough to correct for a problem as big, as exhausting, as this.
The day before we left on a two-week trip, I stood looking at my garden, feeling regretful. It had never looked better. The flowers seemed to all be blooming at once, the black caps ripe, the tomatoes green but perfectly round. I preemptively mourned for the state it was sure to be in upon my return: overgrown and overwhelming.
When we got back—as soon as we drove up in fact—my fears were confirmed. The garden looked as though we had been away for years. The feet of the blueberry bushes were choked with tall grasses, bindweed had conquered the currant bush, and some yellow flowering weed had grown as tall as the asparagus, which is to say over my head. All our hard work had been undone in a matter of weeks. Where would we find the time to fix this? There was only enough time to keep things running in our lives, never enough to correct for a problem as big, as exhausting, as this.
My instinct was to avoid the garden, but my young sons, undeterred by the weeds, hopped out of the car, pulled me toward the gate and got to work foraging: picking midnight blueberries and scarlet cherry tomatoes and spiny cucumbers, wiping them across their palms before eating them through the middle. As they ate, I decided to begin weeding, though I was certain that what little I could do in the next few minutes would be negligible. I pulled the first weed and it came up effortlessly, with zero resistance. I laughed, a single surprised “ha.” What luck, to have chosen the easiest one on my first go! But the next weed was the same, then the next.
Within minutes I had a pile worthy of a wheelbarrow. I sat back on my heels, looked down the length of our garden, and felt a kind of vertigo. This task, which I had dreaded before it even happened, which had disheartened me weeks before, had been nearly effortless. There were lots of reasons why, from diligently weeding the garden for years, to the soil on that day—soft from a recent rain, crumbling from the morning’s sun—being amenable to weeding. Still the feeling remained: some of the hard things I had been worrying aboutmight just turn out all right. Instead of hunkering down and bracing for impact, I could, just maybe, hope for the best.
– Hollynn Huitt
