Weeds

I took a left turn off the country road, out into a field, cleared for plowing.  I followed the ruts left by tractor or truck.  The weeds were knee high.  Wild flowers stood out here and there, white Queen Ann’s Lace, yellow Butter cups, purple Clover, gifts to the coming equinox.  Birds were having a field day, literally.  Their trajectories bringing bugs home to the little ones nested in the tree line, wild roses and cedars giving way to maple, ash, and oak.   Others on the wing finding in the disturbed soil easy access to the worms that were making the soil more fertile by the minute.  I saw a chipmunk shoving his cheeks full of seeds up on his hind legs watching for the black and yellow snake hunting.  No worry.  The snake was twenty feet away and the munk had his eye on him.

The piece of blue plastic caught my attention, fluttering on the two foot stake.  New wood, blond and split, bought by the pack at the lumber yard.   It fluttered, caught by a staple, driven into the meadow.  It was clearly a marker.  I stopped and scanned the field, picking up three more at a glance, below the level of the growing wild flowers and grass, but bright enough to catch the eye.  There was another one. 

When grass sprouts in a pot of petunias, I pull it out.  It doesn’t belong there.  I get the root so it won't sprout again.  Then I heel a depression into a bald spot in the yard and push the rooted grass in.  With a little water it might take hold there. 

The plastic markers weren’t weeds, but they were going to destroy this blooming meadow.  They’d been hammered in and were about to guide the machines that would gouge and tear the earth, to plant roads and foundations and ranch houses, or center hall colonials.   The birds and the chipmunks, even the snake had no idea that their world was about to be paved over.  And I have this thing about wild flowers.

So I weeded.  I found ten of them.  I carried them down the road to a trash can.  But the blue flags will sprout again, fertilized by some obscenities.  The roads and the driveways will have their way.  Such is life.  But today, today the field belongs to the wild flowers, the birds, and the critters.  Today.