What the wicked weed taught me
Oh it tormented me. I’ve lived here 31 years (minus one year where I made that mistake which is a terrible story in and of itself and has nothing whatsoever to do with what the wicked weed taught me). The point was, for 31 years I lived with this stupid weed bush thing on the side of the road on my property. Drove me crazy. It was a tenacious horribly ugly looking thing with many branches and innocuous leaf-like things.
I would hack at it and chop it and even once tried digging it up but the damn thing had roots that went all the way to China. So I just cut it down every year. And the people whose job it is to clear the side of the road would sometimes haphazardly with their machine on any given year lop the top off and that would please me. “There!” I’d say to the horrible thing.
Then the dog-strangling vine came and gardening of any sort took on an
air of misery. And then I got quite ill and so the wicked weed went it’s
wicked weed way for awhile. I would still lament it’s growth so
ridiculously misplaced even for a weed thing, half on and off the slope
to the road with its jumbly moth-eaten greenery lacking any symmetry of
form. On the days when I was feeling better I would make an effort to
dig out the dog-strangling vine around the thing so that it looked
somewhat like a presentable if poorly chosen plant.
The summer when George had died and the silence of my soul came and turned my very being into a numb and broken thing; that summer was not even summer to me. It was just what it was. I would sit looking out at the sweep of trees and sky and feel nothing. Nothing made sense. Nothing at all.
Outside, the weed grew taller and the man who was clearing out the dog-strangling vine came into the house and handed me a perfect apple. One perfect green apple. And I said, “where ever did you get the apple?” And he told me it was from the apple tree on the front by the side of the road. It had produced an apple, my wild wicked weed… one perfect apple. No more. No less. So I went out and looked and there it was… my wild wicked weed grown tall into an apple tree. And me, a country girl, hadn’t even figured it out. Me, the one sent out with baskets to collect apples in the orchard up the road as a child. Me. I did not see what I should have seen.
Sometimes the demons that we fight. Sometimes the battles and the judgment and the struggles turn out to be a blessing. Sometimes we even forget that what we knew once can be forgotten and life may be a re-learning. Sometimes there are unexpected graces and they have no reason for happening. They simply do. This is what the wicked weed taught me.
The summer when George had died and the silence of my soul came and turned my very being into a numb and broken thing; that summer was not even summer to me. It was just what it was. I would sit looking out at the sweep of trees and sky and feel nothing. Nothing made sense. Nothing at all.
Outside, the weed grew taller and the man who was clearing out the dog-strangling vine came into the house and handed me a perfect apple. One perfect green apple. And I said, “where ever did you get the apple?” And he told me it was from the apple tree on the front by the side of the road. It had produced an apple, my wild wicked weed… one perfect apple. No more. No less. So I went out and looked and there it was… my wild wicked weed grown tall into an apple tree. And me, a country girl, hadn’t even figured it out. Me, the one sent out with baskets to collect apples in the orchard up the road as a child. Me. I did not see what I should have seen.
Sometimes the demons that we fight. Sometimes the battles and the judgment and the struggles turn out to be a blessing. Sometimes we even forget that what we knew once can be forgotten and life may be a re-learning. Sometimes there are unexpected graces and they have no reason for happening. They simply do. This is what the wicked weed taught me.
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