weeds

It is clearly spring here and there is a lot to do in the yard which makes me excited but also puts me under some pressure. The clock is ticking and I have to get my seedlings started and in the ground soon! There is soil to prepare and plants to remove and gosh I really need to get serious about building a better system for my enormous compost adventure. I wish I had already drawn a picture for this post of the tiny buds and the delicate pink flower like leaves busting out of them on the Japanese maple, but time is in short supply. I am working hard on publishing the first book, writing a second, setting up a website and or course raising the two enchantresses I have, not to mention all the housewifey things I do every day.

BUT the garden has been calling me and I did manage to get the girls out into the dirt over the weekend. We started by pulling some weeds. There was something gargantuan growing near the compost pile that I had let get big and as I pulled hard at the root, the girls were cheering me on and poking at it with their little pink shovels. I managed to pull the thing up with one hand. They told me I was really strong and danced beside me all the way to the green bin where we deposited the monster. But if that one was going to go, there was another to face. Something had grown up among my Calendula flowers that for some reason I actually thought (or convinced myself) might be some Snapdragons that I had planted which had never come up. Clearly it was a weed now that it was almost my height and flowerless. (Duh!) But this sucker was harder to pull. It hung on for dear life and I had to dig around it to try and loosen its powerful grip. Its roots were wedged in under my studio where I meditate every day and I started thinking about the weeds that have been growing in my consciousness and how there are these terrible voices that try to sabotage me all the time and I used that image to fight the good fight and I pulled and pulled and grunted and screamed and the girls were telling me, "Give up mommy!" because they could tell I was almost in tears but then it gave a little and that got me going, pulling with every last drop of strength, my fingers burning from the tiny prickly hairs along the main stem of this beast. I felt it give a little more. Then, before I was ready it released all its tiny tendrils from the earth at once and with that jolt I lost my balance, falling back on my butt with the beast in my hands over my head raining dirt on my face while the girls screamed with excitement and fear. "Are you okay Mommy??" Yes I was fine, better than fine! I pulled that &#(^#(%*& out and I was feeling pretty good. Next!

I was determined that we would plant a few seeds during the equinox and reluctant to go to the nursery for supplies because I knew I'd spend more than I wanted to there, so at 4pm I was scraping together whatever I had on hand, which turned out to be a few packets of vegetable seeds and flower seeds left over from winter planting, some corn kernels I collected from last summer's minute harvest and some potting soil that was suspiciously damp and slightly foul smelling. It had been sitting out in the rain and I guess the dirt got wet and the wet was trapped in the plastic bag for a while and maybe the soil had gotten moldy or something. I don't know. But it was all we had so we used it, the girls gently tucking tiny seeds under thin blankets of it and I thought: if nothing comes up it doesn't matter. It's the act of planting the seeds that is important. It is symbolic, and my children especially respond to the symbolic gesture more than the outcome. So imagine my surprise when watering them this morning I saw that the tiny green beginnings of new life are springing forth. I guess the soil was okay after all. Either that or they will be sickly and die and we will learn some lessons that way.