Tony Grist (poliphilo) wrote,
Tony Grist
poliphilo

Regressing

My parents were gardeners. I'm not. They made me not be a gardener by coercing me into weeding flowerbeds when I'd much rather have been reading books. What a futile waste of a weekend, I thought, fighting a war against Nature you're never going to win- and my sense of injury produced a kind of sentimental identification with the weeds I was uprooting.  (In the same spirit I once ripped a mole trap out of my grandparents lawn and chucked it in the shrubbery.)  My mother went out yesterday with her walker and started pulling weeds and I felt shamed into joining in. It made me angry with both of us.  Also she spotted the rabbit hole near the house that I've been keeping from her and wished a fox on it. Why? What harm do the rabbits do? Nibble a few leaves that's all. She's just down on them for being wild and out of order. Same thing with the hawthorn by the front gate she wants Matthew to chop down- a proposal that makes my heart ache. Weeds, rabbits, hawthorns- they're what I love about being here.

I mostly manage to hide it, but living like this in my mother's house, I keep turning back into a furious child.
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  • 13 comments

  • Heirlooms

    The distant relative I had dealings with a few years back has died and his widow talks of downsizing- and there's a possibility the family…

  • Academe

    The library is vast. Millions upon millions of books and other media. But if you emabark on any academic study you will be told "You can only…

  • A Sudden Flash

    I was working at yesterday's post- which took more time and effort than you'd think- when I got a sudden flash of "It's wonderful to…