Pigweed

Nonfiction by Erin L. Thompson


“Do you have any skills that aren’t on your resume?” asked the lawyer who was interviewing me for a job. Even though he had waded through the tropical swamp that is August in Times Square, his suit was uncreased and his hair still perfectly furrowed by the comb.

“Well,” I said, “I can operate a backhoe.”

The lawyer’s mouth made a little fleshy pop as it dropped open.

“I spent summers on the family farm in Kalamazoo when I was growing up, and there was a lot of heavy equipment there, so. …” I trailed off, since the lawyer continued to look at me as if I had mentioned that I paid for law school by giving facial tattoos to toddlers.

I didn’t get that job. But I did work as a lawyer for a while, for another firm. I am now a professor and writer in New York City. Most people assume I was born here and started attending premiers at the Metropolitan Opera shortly thereafter.

But really, I’m a “Gorgeous Borgess Baby,” born in Kalamazoo’s Borgess Hospital. I spent my early years in Parchment, Michigan, a model town founded by the Kalamazoo Vegetable Parchment Company for its workers. (They made parchment paper for baking; the modern equivalent would be a city named Saran Wrap.) But just a few miles away was my grandparents’ farm. They made their money elsewhere, including supplying fire protection equipment to the paper mills around town. The farm was for keeping horses as pets and growing alfalfa hay to feed them and gardens to feed the grandchildren.

I don’t talk about backhoes very often, here in New York City. And if I could do that job interview over again, I wouldn’t have answered that question that way. Instead, upon reflection, I would say that the most important skill that doesn’t appear on my résumé is pulling pigweed.

If you wanted to eat corn on the farm, you had to help weed the corn field. And I did want to eat that corn. I loved to hop around the kitchen as the water boiled, waiting while my grandfather jogged back from the garden, rushing to get the corn from the stem to our mouths as quickly as possible. I loved fighting with my cousins about who got which pair of corn holders. I favored the ones shaped like tiny ears of corn themselves, with sharp spikes at the end to skewer the ear between them. Not that I minded getting my hands messy, but the holders made it easier to roll the ear around on top of the dedicated stick of butter, the one used for nothing else, so that it retained a dent at the top where ears had rolled before, a depression filled with melted butter and strands of corn silk.

I didn’t eat corn in Arizona. That’s where we had moved when I was four years old. I understood why. My father had broken his neck in an accident, and wheelchairs don’t mix well with snowy Michigan winters. But, still, Arizona corn tasted bitter and mealy, like even Michigan cows would reject it. And there were no grandparents, no cousins to eat it with. I saved my appetite for the every-other summer I spent on the farm.

But before the corn came the weeding. And weeding was all about pigweed, the pesticide-resistant Amaranthus retroflexus. I’m not a reliable weed-spotter — one day I thought I would surprise my grandmother by weeding her flower bed, and pulled up half of the things she had planted instead — but even I know pigweed, with its gawky, shot-up straightness and its pinky-red taproot, like a pig’s tail pulled from the ground. And I had a lot of practice. A single pigweed can produce 100,000 seeds, and every summer it seemed like all of those seeds landed in the corn patch.

I spent hot hours pulling out all that pigweed. The smallest ones could be gathered by the handful, just a few leaves apiece but already with eager roots that broke with a ripple, like distant gunfire. The bigger pigweeds made me stand up to pull at the right angle to get all the taproot out of the ground. Sometimes it was stuck so hard that I would fall backward when I finally won the wrestling match.

Pigweed was so tough that you couldn’t leave it where it fell. It would reroot itself and be back upright in a few days. So, each weeding session ended with a trip to the burn pile, in a distant corner of the property where escapist pigweed bred itself into even more wily strands.

Summer visits were mostly about eating. Corn, blueberries, and new potatoes troweled out of the dry soil of a corner of the garden. My grandfather made them into what he called “shook potatoes”: boil whole potatoes for a few minutes, drain the water out of the pot, throw in a stick of butter, put on a lid, and shake the whole thing around, the more violently the better, potatoes exploding against the sides of the pot and butter leaking out around the edges. When I see the battered surface of an ancient Greek marble torso, it reminds me of the grainy, half-disintegrated and half-melted texture of shook potatoes.

When I wasn’t eating, I was reading. At first, comic books. But when the aunt that was married to a comic book store owner got divorced, the supply of Richie Rich and Archie dried up. I turned to the laundry basket full of New Yorkers that another aunt had left behind.

Reading a 10-year run of New Yorkers can do a lot of things to an impressionable kid. What it did to me was send me to New York for college, and make me start thinking that maybe I could write someday.

What I didn’t realize then, and what is all too real to me now, is that writing would be so much like weeding. Writing is editing. And editing is painful. Like weeding, editing goes on for what feels like forever, while the rest of the world enjoys itself and your only company is the sun rolling overhead. Like weeding, you just have to edit all over again if you are careless the first time around. Like weeding, editing makes your hands and your eyes hurt.

The only way to do a good job at either editing or weeding is to let a part of your brain daydream about the end result. About how good this corn will taste, once it has a chance to grow without competition. About how delectable your writing will appear to its readers, once all the flavorless clichés and sour grammatical errors are rooted out. That’s what pulling pigweed taught me.

Pigweed, and Michigan, seem so far away from my life now. But crack me open, and they are what you would see.

Like the briefcase. I spent the summer after college on the farm, and when I headed back to New York City for graduate school, one of my aunts gave me a briefcase. Tweed, with leather corners. I started dreaming about what I would carry inside of it, in my new life as an academic. Pens, stationery, books. Maybe even a book I would write.

At the airport, I was pulled aside for a special screening. I laid that briefcase down on the scarred plastic table and popped it open it in front of the TSA officer. There were no pens or paper or books inside. Instead, it was packed full of ears of corn, still in their green husks. My grandfather had broken them from the stalks that morning, as I waited in the car, so my city friends could eat fresh corn for once in their lives.

The Coil

Literature to change your lightbulb.

Alternating Current Press

Written by

Indie press dedicated to lit that challenges readers & has a sense of self, timelessness, & atmosphere. Publisher of @CoilMag #CoilMag (http://thecoilmag.com)

The Coil

The Coil

Literature to change your lightbulb.

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