Weed Whacking
Best to leave the old weeds alone.
I learned that lesson this morning when I tackled the weeds growing along the foundation of our house. The lawnmower could never quite reach them — too close to the wall — and for years I couldn’t be bothered to kneel and cut them with shears.
But this spring I bought a weed whacker. One of those environmentally-friendly, battery-powered ones, painted a jaunty shade of yellow. It’s amazing how much damage a couple of plastic strings will do when spun fast enough.
I started by topping the dense row of weeds before tackling the thick, tangled base. Turned out the tips had grown up the concrete and under the wooden siding. When I tore them out, I saw how they’d split and spread like so many pallid fingers. Silly really, but I couldn’t help thinking of the faint scratching we so often hear in the walls at night.
Then I trimmed deeper into the thick tangle, where the stems were still plump with sap.
There were bones. Small, white bones like those in owl pellets. But these were misshapen and didn’t correspond to any animal I knew.
Strangest of all, whacking close to the ground, I uncovered a fresh mole hill. What was it doing there, encased in weeds? Mole hills draw air into the mole’s tunnel, but this one could hardly be expected to do that, buried, as it was, in that thick, green mass.
And the mole had unearthed mounds of pebbles, smooth and pale as opals. I would have picked them up, cleaned and polished them for my desk, but an image of a monstrous angler fish sprang to mind, dangling its luminous orb, huge mouth ready to swallow any fish foolish enough to take the bait.
So I left the pebbles untouched, cut the weeds around them right down to the dirt, then set the whacker aside and admired my handiwork. Maybe I’d been too zealous; I’d stripped away a lot of old foliage, but I doubted anything fresh and green would grow in the bare strip of rocky earth for quite a while.
A car pulled into our driveway, and when my wife got out, I said, “Hi”, but she walked past me without so much as a nod and slammed the front door behind her.
She’d been visiting her sister for the first time in five years. The one whose kid is an addict and who blames my wife for not lending her the money she says would have made all the difference to their lives.
Later, when I’d raked up the shredded weeds, and replaced the whacker on the garage shelf, I entered our kitchen the back way, through the garage door, and found my wife sobbing at the table, head in hands.
Best to leave the old weeds alone. That’s my advice.
Did you enjoy this strange tale? Be sure to follow The Midnight Mosaic & The Mad River for more of 13 Days of Dark & Weird 2019.
