thistledown


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2003-04-03 - 11:06 p.m.

Muscles I didn't even know I had are hurting tonight. Some of the ones I am well acquainted with are pretty unhappy, too, and I still haven't pulled all the splinters out of my hands. Yesterday, I spent the entire day in manual labor. Do I even need to say it: I earn a living sitting in an office cubicle, and have managed to spend a lot of my lesiure time this winter with butt firmly applied to chair....I am out of shape for manual labor, and possibly working all day "like I was killing snakes" (as my father used to say) was not the kindest way to reintroduce my body to this activity. But I took the day off work, and the weather was perfect, and I just wanted to make some big progress on the yard clean up....and I did.

I got up at the crack of dawn, and put on my overalls and braided my hair ( the appropriate outfit is important, don't you think), and went to the hardware store to buy a stack of paper refuse bags and some new yard tools: weeder, pruning snips, grass shears. And then I spent the next nine hours raking the old leaves and pine needles out of the landscaping, trimming bushes, mowing, pulling weeds. I tore down a huge bittersweet vine that was growing up the side of the house, and cut it into pieces, and managed to hack down the seven-foot-tall clump of dead pampas grass and stuff it into bags. By the end of the day there was a line of ten bags full of debris waiting to be picked up.

I am rewarded with a sense of satisfaction, because as a result, the yard looks like somebody lives here again. But after living here for almost seven years, my beam of satisfaction is also followed by a sigh because I know that all this work will be invisible in a week or so. The leaves will have blown in from the neighbors' yards, and the pine cones will have rained down from the trees. Every little fragment of a weed root that remained after my extermination will begin to grow a new weed plant, and every microscopic seed on the wind will find a place to germinate. The forces of nature are at work every minute to return to the wild what I have presumed to tame, and I am no match for the forces of nature.

Gardening, I think, is a process that requires patience and attention. Every year I swear I will try to develop those traits. Every spring, when everything is starting to look alive again, I am in love with the outdoors for a while, that is before .... (this is a key point).... the mosquitos are out. But once the mosquitos arrive, I am a prisoner in the house, dousing myself in OFF even to go out for a few minutes and water. From what I can tell, some people are not bothered by mosquitos and I think that must be a wonderful quality to have floating in your DNA. If you are a mosquito, I probably look like a big cherry cheese cake.To me, mosquitos are the big argument against an orderly universe. What possible reason could there be for insects to suck your blood and leave huge itchy welts on your skin?

This early in the spring, nothing that stings or bites was on the wing, so it was just me and the damp earth and sunshine. There is nothing quite so encouraging as to see the tender little shoots of the perennials pushing up through last year's dead leaves. I told myself that I was going to spend the day doing one thing at a time.(Trying to do so many things at once that I can't do any of them well is a problem I often create for myself) I remember reading once: The essence of zen is to do one thing at a time. And while I don't claim to be a practitioner of zen, the idea of just setting a task for yourself and then concentrating on doing it mindfully is very appealing to me. I need to do things that allow me to shut off my internal dialogue for a while and just be. And I realized that gardening is really very pleasant when I am not obsessing over all the things that need to be done, and everything I'm not doing while I'm doing it, all the while calling my entire existence into question.

So that was part of my accomplishment for the day: Ten bags and an insight. Oh, and realizing how out of shape I am. But we'll deal with that... um...later.

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