#53 - Weeds
The bane of my existence, as a kid, was my mother's vegetable garden. It was a big one, and I hated it with a passion. My mother really knew how to grow stuff, and she spent many, many hours creeping and crawling up and down between the rows, thinning the lettuce and carrots, pruning tomatoes, pinching off bugs, fertilizing and dusting.
The end result of all her efforts was a bumper crop of practically every vegetable anyone ever heard of. Unfortunately, she was very good at growing weeds too, and that was where I, as the oldest son, fit into the picture. My brother and I could not be trusted to work side-by-side without getting into a dirt fight, and my sisters seemed to have a sixth sense about when it was not a good idea to be caught loitering around with nothing to do. I, therefore, fell into the miserable role of official weeder, and that was that.
Another result of all my mother's tromping up and down the garden rows was that the ground was packed hard as concrete, harder than concrete, and this presented a problem; there was no easy way to get rid of the weeds. If I simply pulled on them, they tore off at ground level, which meant they would grow back quicker than ever in a few days. The only proper way to weed that garden would have been with a pavement breaker. I was really, really sorry we didn't own one.
It goes without saying, I suppose, that my heart was not in the job. I was an unwilling, unenthusiastic, hot, bored and surly weeder, totally devoid of motivation or desire - not a good way to be when trust at the world's worst weed patch. Other than a hoe and a hand cultivator, both of which were useless to me, my dim hopes for an easy way out rested on a medieval assortment of farm implements that hung forgotten in our barn. They were made of iron with vicious looking tines and spiked wheels, and in all respects they matched my mood, but after hauling them all down to the garden and grunting behind them for a few minutes, they proved less than worthless. There was no reasonable way to do the job.
The sad truth was that the weeding never really got done, even though it seemed I spent the whole summer at it. A lot of my time was occupied in daydreams and munching carrots, and sometimes I’d throw cherry tomatoes as high in the air as I could and try to catch them in my mouth, staggering around through the eggplants and peppers to get into position. There were occasions when my friends would come over and climb up the rope ladder into my tree house in the big pine tree at the end of the garden, and from there they would taunt me. So, I gathered up the juiciest ammunition I could find at my feet and lobbed cucumbers, giant zucchinis and beefsteak tomatoes at them. Looking back on it, I was not a good person to have hanging around a vegetable garden, period.
The amazing part of this story is that somehow or other I overcame my cruel beginnings as a gardener. Somewhere along the line, a craving for home-grown vegetables got into my blood. That might make sense, considering the velocity at which some of those cherry tomatoes shot down my throat. Nevertheless, I had a lot of terrible memories to deal with.
In time, the nightmares, with me standing in the middle of a weed patch stretching to the horizon, became less frequent. I gradually blocked them out of my mind, and the word “weed” fell into disuse. Then one day I actually caught myself thinking it might be nice to have a vegetable garden.
I find today that I have become a tolerably good gardener, and the weeds I deal with the best I can. I can't say I attack them cheerfully, but at least now I’m the one who came up with the idea.