—an excerpt—
The worst part about weeding, I figure, has to be determining what belongs and what has to go.
My gloved hands find a cluster of overgrown vetch, and follow the thin woody stem to its base, tugging slowly and gently to remove as much as possible in one pull, without uprooting any of the lavender it loves to tangle with.
Here on the farm, it’s not my decision to make, what stays and what goes. The boss tells Abby what he wants, and Abby tells me, and I try to keep my thoughts to myself.
Abby, in her canvas pants and leather work boots, shows me how to weed and what to weed, and then she moves on to another section or another job while I keep at it.
In the wild berms, Abby says, and in the forest, let the thistle do its thing. The pollinators love it, the monarchs and the bees -- the precious bees we are trying to save from colony collapse – they need it.
So, in the wild parts, she says, the thistle can flower, seed out, and prick anyone who dares to approach, but in the mulched beds around the house -- where specific perennials have been planted for their looks -- we have to pull it, ideally before it flowers. That is the rule.
As she walks away, her long chocolate-coloured braid dangles between her shoulders, and I am envious of it. She has kids, older teens like mine, I think, but I am not sure they live with her. I don’t know how she braids her own hair, but she must, if she lives alone.
She doesn’t talk much while we work, and I am full of questions.
I used to braid my daughters’ hair, but I have never been able to do my own. My mother always braided my hair when I was young, brushing and weaving, gripping tightly the slippery light-brown strands.
Back then, as a child in Indiana, I only knew Canada from textbooks.
The big northern place was just a wholesome, quiet puzzle piece that sat placidly atop my country in the geography books, or it evaporated into nothingness on the page.
Canada remained quiet in my imagination, from those early school days, almost right up to when we got here, when it started to become a complicated, endlessly curious new home.
In my imagination long ago, it had also been a righteous wilderness, the place in my history books where people had gone when they could no longer abide specific injustices of America.
