thistledown


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2002-06-30 - 9:37 p.m.

This is my first online journal entry but also about the zillionth time I have sat down to write about my life in a journal of some kind, so it still feels like home. [I had those tiny little five year diaries when I was a kid, the kind that came with a lock and key.....as a teen I filled page after page of notebook paper with top secret stuff about the crushes and the parents.... and much of my adult life is on paper is some way....writing, drawing, photos.] I've stirred up a lot of words and yet destroyed much of the evidence along the way. Because I've started aspects of my life over so many times, and always recreated myself as a new character to act in each new drama. But I am tired of altering myself to suit the realities of others. I want to take all these pieces and put them together in some kind of coherent whole. Explain myself to myself, without apology.

I've learned a few things about this process. At some point I realized that my observations and insights about life were what I valued and wanted to remember, not just what I did and how I felt about it. So many of life's activities and emotions seem to happen over and over..... but my thoughts and ideas and stories are what move me forward in the world. I try to learn something from everything that happens to me. I may not necessarily always learn something good. But something.

"Thistledown" is the silky, gossamer, almost-lighter-than-air substance that is attached to the seeds of a thistle. In one of those amazing ironies of nature, the most prickly and repulsive plant produces soft down (I thought it was made by fairies when I was a little girl...) and blooms in beautiful shades of lavender. The thistle metaphor keeps coming up in my life at different times, in weirdly different ways. Secretly, I have a great respect for weeds, even though I do battle with them in my little gardens. I've always felt a bit like a weed, hanging on tenaciously to my desire to grow and flower, even where I am not cultivated.

This story is one of my childhood memories about thistles, and one nexus of their significance as a recurring theme in my life:

The first time I worked hard enough to blister my hands, I was chopping down thistles in a pasture on my family's farm. I was twelve. Thistles grew in profusion on the scrubby hills of this little farm; they towered in colonies that robbed the cattle of grass, and they were my father's sworn enemy. Maybe there and then, people were not so quick to dump poisons, in the form of herbicides, on their land, or perhaps we just couldn't afford it. But my father attacked this problem as he did most others: with muscle, sweat and anger. The tall, thick stalked thistles were first felled with a machete, and then the roots were chopped and dug from the ground with a hoe. The uprooted plant was gingerly picked up on the edge of a hoe - there is no safe place to touch a thistle - and transported to a pile to be burned. (Left in the field, the pieces could still re-establish roots!) Of course I believed thistles were my enemy, too. They made it treacherous to go barefoot, which was my natural state in the summer, and seemed to be a hostile presence in the fields and woods I endlessly prowled. But mainly because I learned my attitudes from my father who was engaged in a constant, personal war against the forces of nature.

Chopping thistles was hard, dirty work. By the time they were big enough to be a problem, it was mid-summer and the sun was making heat-wave mirages in the air above the glowing greenness of the pasture. Although I think my father could have made serious inroads on the thistle population all by himself, he worked long hours in town, and took care of the farm nights and weekends, often working in the barn until late at night. So I was out of school, a "big strappin' kid" as he always called me (I was an adult before I realized that wasn't an appropriate descriptor for a girl maybe five feet tall and 90 pounds). And even though he really didn't understand why I couldn't recognize work to be done and do it out of a sense of responsibility (does any child ever do that?) he bribed me to chop thistles with a rare offer of payment: a penny apiece. It never seemed like much, even then, for such hard labor. I ventured forth a few times with hoe and machete, keeping a tally in my head as I worked: fifty cents, seventy-five cents... for a whole afternoon. It was a hard way to make money.

I hadn't planned on chopping thistles the day we were expecting company from out of town. We were cleaned up and waiting to meet my mother's favorite aunt, all the way from California, and an entourage of other unfamiliar relatives. The house was in order and fresh tomatoes brought in from the garden for our picnic lunch. We watched excitedly for their big car to creep down the gravel road, dancing around as they made their way to the house.... and yes, Aunt Lucille was indeed warm and charming and vibrant, and so glad to see my mother and her.....three..... beautiful little children. She got down on her knees and gathered them into her arms, beaming with delight. I was invisible, she had not even seen me. I stood there watching as our guests cooed over my younger siblings, feeling gigantic and repulsive, feeling green and scaly and unredeemed, an evil, ugly and jealous weed.

What do I become when I am no longer a child, and yet have no other identity, no other skills? What do I question, besides myself, always myself? The world is as it is, and I don't belong. Now what will I do?

I turned and slipped away from the group that did not notice, and ran to the shed for the machete and hoe. And then I marched out to the field where the stands of thistles grew thick, and began to chop.

So what if they don't see me, if I'm big and ugly, at least I can do this, I can work hard and make money, and they can't ignore me if I'm out here, I can just stay out here until they leave, they can't ignore me if I'm gone....

And I swung that knife and hoe with all the energy that my wounded feelings had built up in me, and kept swinging, willing to let it hurt, willing to let the rough handle of the hoe blister my hands, the big thistles scratch my legs as they fell, the sweat run in my eyes.

The morning stretched in to a hot and dry afternoon. I kept working, chopping and counting... 100 thistles, 150..... once I circled up behind the barn and got a long drink of water from the tap. And then went back to work. Gradually the task became more than a wild rush of hurt and anger. I began to perfect my swing with the big knife, to learn exactly where and how hard to hit the big thistles. I began to challenge myself to fell them in fewer strokes, all the time keeping count.... 200.....250. I began to see the thistles as a worthy foe, intelligent, protecting their existence with the only weapon they had: the power to repel. I understood.

From a distance I watched the house. I could hear the occasional rise of voices, the shrieks of the kids, see the smoke rising from the grill, and the big car still pulled up in the lane. And still I chopped, working past hunger and thirst, ignoring my sun burnt skin, my bleeding hands, and all my comfort seeking instincts. As long as I just kept working, the world contained only me and thousands of thistles.

Sometime around evening I finally stopped on a nice round number: 500. The big car had been gone for a while, and the voices were quiet. I was exhausted and none of it mattered any more. I limped back to the house and put away my tools. All I wanted to do was tell my father I had chopped down 500 thistles. I thought at least he would be proud of me.

At first he didn't believe me. But then when he saw the huge pile of thistles, and my mother said yes, I had ignored the company and spent the whole day in the field, he grudgingly paid up: Five dollars.

But, he said, we can't be spending this kind of money on thistles. So, from now on, the rate is two thistles for a penny.

And I said, sure.... OK. I didn't care. Because I had proved something to myself. And somehow I knew I'd never need to do it again.

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