Posted by Elizabeth

The tools of my trade

On Wednesday morning I arrived at the farm, a little less bleary-eyed and nervous about what week two would bring.  I was immediately greeted by S., the girl with the chic cowboy hat, who waved and told me that V. was already in the field weeding soybeans.  As I grabbed a hoe and made my way through the neat rows I contemplated which was worse:  weeding or uprooting diseased plants, last week’s unenviable duty.  My own lawn is riddled with giant fists of clover, spreading through the crisp green blades like a clubbed hand.  If I couldn’t manage to take care of my own minuscule lawn, how was I going to tend to an entire field?  I asked V. how to decipher the plants from the weeds, which seemed to be one tangled mess.  She pointed at a delicate lime-colored shoot, poking its head through a wild jungle of foliage.  “That’s the plant, everything else are weeds.”

I started at one end of a row, happy to work on my own for awhile.  Here the plants were small, barely established, and the weeds had so overtaken the patch that it was easy to miss the starts.  As I raked the hoe down the row, I noticed that the weeds liked to congregate at the base of the plant, choking off the life source.  I worked gingerly around the baby shoots, carefully extracting the enmeshed weeds that held the plant in a choke hold.  As I set about this oddly satisfying work, it got me thinking about humans, and how much we have in common with plants.  How many “weedy” relationships have I been in, which threatened to suck the life out of me?  The “weeds of life” often masquerade as bad habits, sidling up next to us, small and innocent at first, and then taking over our lives before we know what happened.  Sometimes weeds look prettier than the plants themselves; jaded by their pleasing visage we mistake them for something beneficial, and don’t realize their detrimental effect on our life until it’s too late.  The shoots most riddled with weeds looked haggard and withered, barely recognizable as a plant.  But I knew that once I freed them they would snap back to life, their bases growing stronger, sprouting tender leaves that stretched toward the sun.  I’ve learned from my own postage stamp of a garden not to count a plant out prematurely.  Like humans, they are resilient.

Cursed clover!

As I made my way down the row the plants grew taller and lusher, fanning their broad leaves in the soft morning breeze.  Fuzzy bean pods, dangling from the underbelly like delicate earrings, marked the more mature plants.  Here the weeds were sparser, but more pervasive.  At first glance the plants seemed fine, but upon closer inspection the tendrils of creeper vines had spiraled their way up the base, wrapping their spindly arms around the succulent leaves.  Weeds can be sneaky this way, hiding in the dark corners of the garden, slowly advancing unseen.  How much easier it is to uproot the unwanted elements of our lives before they’ve had a chance to take hold!  I worked diligently to unfurl the tiny vines from the plants, which took much longer to uproot than the larger, more obvious sprays of clover. Although they didn’t appear so, the vines were clearly the more dangerous weeds, the unassuming ones.

I have a feeling that I have a great deal to learn from weeding.  I tend to stay in bad relationships longer than I should.  I often neglect the everyday details of my life in favor of more glamorous affairs, deeming them unimportant.  While not a procrastinator by nature, I do a poor job of taking care of pedestrian details as they arise, letting them languish and snowball into a mess of tasks that is so overwhelming that they remain largely undone.  I wonder how much less chaotic my world would feel if I simply plucked the weeds of my life, one by one, as they entered my garden?  By ignoring the ordinary and constantly searching for novelty, by refusing to muck about in the dregs of the everyday, I know I am missing something important.

I learned this week that, until the harvest is in full swing, Wednesday are largely maintenance days around the farm.  The universe obviously thinks I have a lot of learn from weeding, too.

What are the weeds in your life?