Weeding

I weeded the back garden yesterday. The good thing about weeding at this time of year is the weeds are weakening. They don’t grip the earth in the same kind of life or death way. Most of them come out pretty easy. It’s a good excuse for having not weeded earlier.

I think one of the reasons the weeds are feeling this way is because their heads are in full blossom. The force of their life is in their seed. But what I did was squeeze the weed heads between my fingers so the seed pods or fluffs couldn’t scatter all over and sink into the soil and seed new weeds. Ha ha, I thought, to the weeds, as I placed their seed in paper garden bags, I have outsmarted you.

My hair dresser told me I should wear my hair so this bang section sweeps across my face from the left side over to the right. Before I just pulled it straight back. It looks really nice. It looks sophisticated. Except it means the bang hair tends to fall into my face sometimes covering my right eye. This feels nice too, like I’m an unkempt street urchin who doesn’t miss a trick and with a smart mouth to go along.

Except when I’m gardening. Would the damn hair get off my face already? I have to keep brushing it back plus my hands are covered in dirt from gardening and the dirt is getting all in my hair and my face repeatedly.

To deal with that, I went and got this hair clip I bought like three months ago that’s been sitting in the bottom of my purse and now has something all sticky on it. I don’t know what it is. It has the consistency of tree sap only there’s no way that’s what it is. I certainly haven’t been near tree sap over the past few months. It's been a very long time since I've been out in the garden.

So after a while some of the hairs started falling out of the clip so I had to take the clip off in order to get them back in only I couldn’t because the sticky stuff on the clip was sticking to my hair and it hurt too much to take it off. I sat down under the red maple in a lawn chair and eased it out. It wasn’t that bad.

The wind was blowing through the leaves of the red maple and it was making rustling sounds. There were just a few leaves on the ground from its leaves beginning to fall. There was nothing beautiful or exciting about these leaves because the leaves of red maples don’t change colour in the fall.

I had to get something hard and skinny to dig in the cracks of the hair clip to get the sticky stuff out but couldn’t see anything useful. The tree rustled some more and I decided to try one of the stems of one of its leaves. I pulled one off the tree. It worked okay. I got some of the sticky stuff out. But the leaf stem was still too supple from being so recently alive. Then I looked down on the ground and there was an old thin hard twig that finished the job off perfectly.

I went to pick up Jacob from school then to get some wine. I was looking for this one particular South Australian wine Larry and I got last time but couldn’t see it. Jacob was pulling this special plastic basket that you put your wine in with wheels on it like the kind of rolling-on-wheels suitcases people pull behind them in airports. He kept rolling it around under my feet and complaining I wasn't asking for help when I was enjoying just looking on my own.

Then I went to ask for help and he said, finally. We sampled some wines from the Asass region in France which is near the German border and which used to keep switching back and forth between being part of France then part of Germany. Only Jacob was embarrassed I was getting him to sample the wine too because he’s only twelve and doesn’t like breaking rules. So I told him to have some crackers and cheese which were also part of what was being offered for sampling along with the wine.

The lady demonstrating the wine acted like there was something she knew that was maybe about us that she wasn’t telling. She was elderly. I tried not to look at her face too closely because if I did I would notice how deep her wrinkles were and she might see my noticing them in my eyes and I didn't want to hurt her feelings. So she had the power. Which I think is what made her look like she had a secret she swallowed that was still stuck in her throat and that might jump out any second if she wasn’t careful.