"Everything the light touches...[is yours]" Mufasa famously said to his son Simba in Lion King. Every time I open my front door and look out across the expanse of our lawn/rock garden I picture this scene in my mind, puff out my lungs a little with pride, and think I am the mighty keeper of these grounds.
Ok, so the lawn is more like a forrest--it grows at a freakish rate and quickly gets overrun with all manner of creepers and crawlies. And the rock garden is more like two random clumps of loose gravel that somehow manage to produce more weeds than anywhere else in the yard...but still it is something of an achievement to live in your first house and have your own grass to cut and flowers to pick.
Growing up I never much cared for yard work. I was the first to disappear when it was time to pack paper bags full of fallen pine cones so my father could mow the lawn. And if anyone even mentioned mushy apple duty (picking up fallen, rotting apples from underneath our three fruit trees) I conveniently made other commitments fast. But the older I get the more I'm finding that the chores I considered "adult stuff" are not so bad. Some of it is actually pretty fun! Cooking my own meals, scrubbing my own floors, even doing my own laundry has all become something of a rite of passage for me. Something to reap the benefits from. Something to be proud of, even.
Mowing the lawn and pulling up weeds are acts of catharsis. Therapeutic. A time to sweat about something other than schoolwork and focus energy on a chore that doesn't require much thought or anxiety. In a Buddhist kind of way I find more peace with my environment when I'm doing yard-work. Small garden spiders and ear-wigs scatter around me and for once I don't scream, don't stomp furiously at the ground trying to snuff the life out of them. They don't bother me and I don't bother them.
The last couple of weeks have seen a lot of rain and a lot of sunshine, meaning the growing things in the yard are primed for explosion onto the surface. With each passing day my housemates and I found more clumps of weeds spreading like smallpox across the shallow gravel, threatening to choke out what sections of the flower bed survived the mild winter. Dandelions, purslane, ground ivy, chickweeds, bull thistle, Russian thistle, and wild onions all shoulder one another, trying to gain some elbow room as they inch closer and closer to the tulips, the daffodils, the rose bush blushing in the corner and the brave soldier line of hyacinths toeing the sidewalk.
Arming myself with gloves and a garbage bag I set out for battle and find joy in the challenge of loosening the invaders from their posts. Each weed requires a different approach: the purslane and wild onion are simplest, as they are the most shallow and pull away easily. The thistles and dandelions have to have their leaves bunched around them and twisted like a lightbulb, using equal leverage on each side to wrestle it from the earth. The others vary in how easy they are to get out, but all of them share the same reward. The satisfaction inherent to hearing the *pop* of roots separating from the rest of the soil and meeting the air, seeing the whole plant swinging there in your hand. It's a primal kind of happiness, like I imagine our ancestors had when they bonked squirrels on the heads with their clubs or pulled up their first harvest (or whatever they did).
At the end of the day I pick a few of the flowers and stick them in a vase on our table, looking once more across the lawn before closing the door. I am the mighty keeper of these grounds...
