Weeding

Woke up much too early, but that is what was ordained, so arose, went out into a crisp--for this Florida blood glacial--sunrise morning to do some weeding.  There was growth all along the edge of the raised beds and between most of the slabs of the pavement between them.  I stood bent over for a bit, and was instantly reminded of my mother in a similar position.  She was a short, definitely rotund woman, who had a commanding manner, being not only somewhat of a snob (family in a America for centuries, late husband super star doctor) but a long time president of the town school board, commanding, when she was standing, but bending over in the garden did not show her to advantage, plus she had a habit of wearing plaid cotton wash dresses as she went about her notion of household tasks (there was staff who did the heavy lifting).  Weeding was an obsession, nay, an addiction.  And so I saw her this morning in my mind's eye--that large plaid bottom of the bent  over figure.  Our property had many formal gardens on different levels of the land as it sloped up from the street and then sloped down to the fields that lay beyond.  The gardens were tended by a man who worked six days of the week, but there was always a weed here or there, and they caught her  eye.  Always, and no matter what she was doing and where she was going.  I can remember her weeding "just a bit, just for a moment," while waiting for her to drive me on some errand.  I can see her in her dressed up business suit, about to go to a school board meeting, the big pinstriped bottom, of the bent over figure.  Weeding is perhaps like saying the rosary, it frees you from having to think, relaxes the anxiety of things left undone, worrying about children and friends who need your correction. Weeding is meditation.  Moreover, weeding in as an absolute good, an unequivocal forward march in the struggle against the tyranny of encroaching nature threatening in its blind instinct to insinuate into everything, just as here where I am weeding the formal gardens, the raised beds, the stone pavements, the fountains with their jets of water depending from one level to the next, the carefully trimmed and pruned rose bushes are the imposition of order upon anarchy.  I weeded for two hours, standing and bending over, delighted that I managed to keep from toppling over, as I often thought I was going to do, kneeling on a little cushion to rest the muscles in the back of my thighs, but instead damaging the kneecaps, and again glorying in the pathetic little fact that I could rise from that position without a railing.  Then to breakfast, to read the Times, and when it came time to go once more into the breach and do battle against the weeds, I found that all the joints had frozen while I sat, and so I limped back to my battle station, and only very slowly managed to bend and then to kneel, and I thought to myself that it never occurred to me in those long ago days to wonder if my mother found weeding the least bit taxing physically.  She seemed like a fixture of the garden, like the plants, the trellis, the ordered rows of flowers and vegetables.