Of Weeds, a Wreath
We let it die. Fully. In the depths of previous summers we occasionally sprinkled it with halfhearted hope for survival. Not this time. The lawn is a crisp brown rectangle, as useful as it ever was.
Or more. A pair of mourning doves found a green ceramic pot on the top shelf of the flower stand out front. It sat high under the awning, out of sight from flyer-bys, out of reach from cats. In a day’s work, they wove a nest inside of it. The male would fly off, its wings squeaking like a rusty wheel as it went scavenging for stems and blades of dead weeds. His companion would sit in the pot, taking the building materials he retrieved and weaving them into a spiral. From the living room, I could see her silhouette carefully threading each strand. The pot has decorative shapes cut into the side, squares and eye-shaped ovals. Her glossy black eye would sometimes center in the oval cutouts, as if the pot itself had a watchful eye.
Each day I’d look out the window and see a tail sticking up out of the pot, brooding a pair of slick white eggs. The narrow tail of the mother and the wide tail of the father would loyally rotate in the mornings and evenings. For weeks they sat still until a pair of fuzzy gray heads sprung up and bobbled about. At times unattended, the chicks would look up at me through the window with beady black, curious eyes as I peered down through the blinds. The parents would return with a gullet full of feed. Both babies would stick their beaks up inside the parent’s mouth for an aggressive feeding ritual. From my view, their heads would disappear inside the parents’ mouths as they lifted and lowered.
One morning, I opened the door and stopped myself mid-step as I left the house. Both chicks had made their way onto the welcome mat and sat there huddled next to each other. One flapped as vigorously as it could, only making it inches off the ground and mere feet away with its underdeveloped wings. The other remained sitting right where my foot would have fallen.
Hundreds of tiny nest mites were crawling all over the nest. The ones that had eaten were maroon, full of blood, and the others remained translucent yellow. The chicks had enough with the nuisance and made an early descent. The parents, knowing best, guided the chicks into a shrouded corner in the backyard later in the day. They would eventually mature under the fern tree and regularly come back to the yard to feed on the brown, weed infested lawn shedding a medley of seeds onto bone dry soil.
I figured I would do the doves a favor and exterminate the nest mites in case they wanted to come back for another brood in their penthouse roost. I wrapped the pot in a black trash bag and set it out in the sun in attempt to bake the mites away. They continued to crawl around unfazed. I took the nest out and hosed it down with the nozzle on the “JET” setting. They still crawled out of small air bubble holes in the ceramic glaze. I boiled it in a pot of water on the gas stove, ladling scalding water over the parts of it that weren’t submerged until it was conclusively mite free. Although, I felt uncomfortable with the fact that I destroyed their nest, that elaborately woven wreath, even though it was riddled with parasites.
Out front, I began my own scavenge. Around the edges of the desolate lawn, I plucked long stems and shucked the seeds from their tops. I stripped blades from long strands of crab grass. I found a delicate twig resting on patch of dirt. As best I could, I wove it all together into the bricolage spiral, mimicking the pattern I’d seen the mother taking the whole day to carefully spin. I set the nest back up in the same place and head inside.
Not an hour later, I heard the male calling his mate over to the nest with a coo-OO-oo. They swapped spots and the male went out in the yard once more, picking out a few additional weed stalks that the expectant mother wove into their new, pest-free nest, as if to level out the last picture frame hung on a wall before settling into a new home. Within days, a single white egg sat in the middle of those lifeless blades of grass.
