This morning walking into my backyard, I felt the same as I did one spring morning decades ago. Early spring. Winter had not quite given up the grasp, but the rains had started to come. The air was warm enough for the ground to soften, and any remaining snow had started to melt. I rested my arms on a window sill that came just about waist high. My chin nestled in to that circular space your thumbs create between your pointer fingers when you clasp your hands. I was blowing a small pattern on the window and tracing what might have resembled a rose with my pinky finger. My grandmother was humming in the background as she was cleaning dishes in the kitchen. Always doing dishes in the morning. In the afternoon, pulling weeds.
I knew that if she noticed my design on the window, I would have been scolded. The windows were to be kept clean. This was the one thing that company would always notice, you see. A dirty window. My grandmother has only visited my house once, and that is a good thing. My older self does not keep clean windows. I cover them up. However, my child self was using the window for the intended purpose. To view out into the beautiful landscape and watch with melancholy the last of the snow melt away after a warm spring rain. A saw a black and white bird wrestle a small fallen branch from the ground and lift it away to a future nest way up in the boughs of the cottonwood tree. I could see my future there below the tree. The early, mid calf length alfalfa sprouts coming up in between the dormant rose bushes. My future was to be out there, after the rains, pulling the sprouts. One by one.
My grandma, the expert weed puller that she was, knew the best time was when the ground was thawed, and after the rains. You could then pull the entire sprout at the root and get the whole plant. Ripping a alfalfa plant off at the stem was just a temporary set back. That would be a full shoot again by midnight. There was an occasional dandelion or perhaps some lambsquarters, but in the midwest it was alfalfa. You see the cash crop out in the field was a sight to behold. Fields and fields of clover like green as far as the eye could see. However, here in the rose bushes and other flower beds – a weed. I have only seen an alfalfa field go to flower once in my life. The farmer of the field had passed away, and the field was left unattended. A sea of beautiful purple flowers. Bees everywhere. But that never happens. It is always cut before flowering, when the protein is rich and the stalks perfect for hay.
Despite that the plants now waved in the morning breeze, portraying as my nemesis. My grandma, now done with the dishes was preparing for war. Gloves laid out. Small spade ready for the tough spots. Kettle of boiling water to kill any sprouts that had managed to set seed in the cracks of the concrete. She had her weed pulling uniform on and I had, well, whatever I had on. I had no weed pulling uniform. I had my glorious and chipper attitude. There we went, out into the backyard, warriors to battle. We were going to take on the alfalfa sprouts today. We just called them weeds, but that is what they were. This was spring. The season of lent, and no good Catholic woman could allow weeds to sprout in her yard going unchecked. So the great war of 1982 began. Little did we know that the great and horrible day of the May 2nd 1982 was around the corner. That is when the oil shale industry would go belly up. For now, all looked splendid. A crisp mid morning. Rains recently retreated. Sun breaking through the clouds in the sky. Cold yet warm all over. We tramped through the grass, I remember my shoes getting wet from the grass.
We knelt down in a patch to start pulling weeds. I got my knees wet as well. My grandma had gloves, I did not. We started to pull. I started to learn. The weeds of change tossed back and forth in front of me as the wind picked up a little. I remember my Grandmother’s short gray/blond hair blowing slightly in the wind as she explained the very critical concepts that were to rule my next several hours. First, you absolutely cannot pull an alfalfa sprout by the midpoint. You must always pinch the sprout at the bottom and very close to the root. The sprout is a stalk that tangles around almost everything it grows near. So if you pull to close to the top, you add the strength of other plants with its stem and you end up tearing the top part of the plant and leave the root. That is a rallying cry for any alfalfa plant. A torn stem encourages more growth and before you know it, you have 6 stems where there used to be only one. So your only choice is to get the root in one pull.
This is why you go after them when they are young and the ground is soft. They have a tangled root, similar to their stalks. However, young they have small root systems. With soft, wet ground they pull easy. However, here is the fun part. You can only pull them one at a time. You cannot grab a bunch all at once and pull, because they gain strength in numbers. You must selectively grab each primary stalk, one at a time and pull. One by one. Brute force. It is the only way. They will resist most weed killers that will not also kill your flowers. They will burn, but so will your wood shingle house. So the only choice is one by one, each root carefully, precisely, wiggled out of the ground. If they broke off, that is what the spade was for. No root left behind in my Grandma’s flower bed. No root left behind.
Some problems in life are solved only one troublesome weed at at time. Slow patience, careful extraction. Removal at the core of the issue. Carefully and without complaint. Slowly as the morning turns into afternoon and after a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, a pile of alfalfa roots and stems lays piled up on an old sheet. You see, Grandpa would come by (eventually) and lift the four corners of the sheet and pile them up on a tractor trailer and taken to the burn pile. His philosophy was a bit different then Grandmas. Most gardening problems could be put off, that was the first rule. The second and third rules involved tractors and fire. Not usually in that order. We would normally spend 6 hours trying to fix the tractor, which always involved a blow torch and then another hour or two collecting things to burn them with another blow torch. I was the lucky one that got to participate in both ends of this supply chain. The collection and the disposal.
Watching my condensed breath on the window slowly evaporate, I could hear the conversation behind me change. My grandmother had stopped humming. The dryer was buzzing in the background. My father had retreated to a soft chair and my mother was becoming animated. My grandfather’s sport had turned serious. The conversation went somewhere that I did not understand. They were arguing about something. My mother was a pretty good adversary in a discussion such as this, and my Grandfather would rather have a terse discussion than do any one of the “honey do’s” on his list. Pulling weeds suddenly seemed like a really good idea. My grandmother’s hand gentle rests on my head, “time to pull weeds.” Perhaps it is this moment that pulling weeds has become surprisingly therapeutic for me later in life.
That is this morning for me. Staring out the window at my hillside, I noted the alfalfa sprouts making their way up through the ground cover. I have some problems brewing. The water glistening off the alfalfa leaves reminds me. It is time. Time to go to war. The Weeds of Change are once again calling.
