Tap Root

I’m sipping my evening martini, rocking the porch swing with the tips of my sneakers and looking east but I’m picturing what’s happening to the west, on the other side of the house, as the sun shatters in the pines.

All day I worked the azalea bed back there, the fork-tipped trowel thrust as deep as I could get it next to a tap root of thistle or dandelion, levering each one with the right hand, pulling it with the left, bits of dirt flying into my face and down my shirt, holding each dislodged plant in my gaze briefly to heighten the satisfaction of its removal, then flinging it over my shoulder onto the lawn behind me. Like a four year old, enchanted by repetition, my satisfaction builds. There’s another one! And another! Of course in choosing to work on the azalea border I condemned the cutting bed to another week or more of chaos and neglect.

Azaleas bloom before lilies, I reasoned, but it’s the cutting bed I’m picturing as I rock. The deer won’t eat those weeds I ruminate, over-chewing an olive to extract every molecule of flavor. Behind my head I picture their slender legs carrying them down the wood margin in the after-light of dusk, like bride’s maids to the altar in hesitation step, they make straight for the neglected hyacinth, lily and tulip greens, nosing unraked leaf mold out of their way, biting leaves off as close to the ground as they can.

This bothers me less than it should. All day I enjoyed manifesting my desire for a weed-free azalea border and every morning and evening the white-tail manifest desires in munching through my cutting bed. I work hard to see something I’ve only dreamed about take corporal form but I won’t  fence it or protect any of it. Why? I don’t really know. It doesn’t make sense.

I love the wild deer as much as I love having lilies at hand. I guess that’s the reason. And, no, there are not too many deer in my area. I’m surrounded by hunters. And anyway, some lilies always escape the foraging and give me bouquets I’ll bring into the house and enjoy this summer. I’ll cultivate a flower bed but it’s the wild things I root for in my heart as they fend for themselves in the margins they’ve been left.

For all of us there sometimes seems to be an element of common sense missing from the choices we make, and those of us governed more by patterned thinking, if pressed for rationale, sometimes have to scramble to assemble, in after thought, a reason for what we know is right and yet for which we have no ready explanation.

Those who are more logically inclined are not better off. They sometimes have to fib to themselves to make a syllogism work.

So, we’re all pretty silly. No matter. It’s no matter at all. I toast the tap root in us, so difficult to dislodge whatever it is I mean by that, and I toast endeavors illogical yet deeply enjoyed; to the wild and to the tame.