I am about sick

Sitting here alone after the first full month of retirement, I find myself surrounded everywhere I look with "shit I ought to do" and get terrible down on myself for doing so little. Just how long does the retirement excuse work anyway. For about a week I have had in the nagging back of my mind that I should load the truck with some brush and scrub for a trip to the recycling center run by York County. I have a deal with myself: I take one load to be shredded and I get to buy a pickup load of hardwood mulch for $10 to bring home and cut down on the amount of mowing I need to do. This is one hell of an operation, they can deliver your topsoil or mulch with a bulldozer if you happen to need that much, it's extremely beneficial to the community with the great amount of downed trees, et cetera that this part of Virginia generates, I get an unlimited amount of dump weight allowed as a resident, the cost is a real bargain, and it's only three miles from my house (all on back roads for which my aging F-150 is grateful.)

There is a very unsightly tangle of overgrowth at the corner of my lot where in years past I had cut scrub trees down to open the depths of woods in the view from the street. There is a kind of maniacal growing tree taken residence there - cut a good size tree down and ten suckers shoot out from the stump. I have in mind not only neighborly neatness but also to extend the cedar rail fence across the entire front of my lot and to plant a dwarf orchard behind it. Yesterday FedEx delivered a pawpaw from Stark Brothers, so today finally I back the truck up and grab my sharp implements of vegan destruction intent to wreak havoc on the "back nine."

It is ugly in a hacking through the Amazon kind of way. I take a compound lopper to work on all the waist high tree suckers fair enough, they cut easily and fall where they lay, but when I grab and pull there is some type of snarley creeping vine that has its' claws wrapped around everything. Nothing is immune: lop, lop, lop, lop, grab, pull, -snarltangle- go back, slice the parasitic vines all to hell, break it free and stack the whole pile up. This vine is extremely pervasive. It has climbed on anything upright in sight and makes the leap from brush to shrub to tree wherever they meet. This thing has at times four, five, six creepers wrapped around what I have brushed down, when I yank the snakes move around under the leaf litter and never originate where I suspect they are. I don't know what this is and every once in a while I remember Virginia has some very nasty things growing here which WILL break you out in bleeding sores. But it doesn't have leaves of three, in fact, it seems to have a sort of pleasant fragrance to it freshly cut, but man is it tenacious. I am in shorts of course, wearing white socks and my work boots, and these ... these ... "things" are brushing around my ankles and it is more than a bit creepy. Plus, here's a bonus: Everything takes twice as long.

But I persevere! I am Henry Morton Stanley in Zanzabar! I hack slash and am merciless - a real weed killer. I back up the truck and admire my work for a smokewhile then proceed to load up. Even then I have another fight on my hands because nothing on the ground moves without dragging along everything on the ground, and nothing fits into the truck neatly - I have to wrap and tangle things together to get them to fit. Finally it gets done.

And then ... oh, then ...

See what I did there?

... one little branch brushes my arm like one of Charlie Brown's Christmas tree pinecones. I look closer. A dim light of recognition comes to me. And I am almost physically sick.

How many years did that grape vine struggle against the forest goliaths to fight it's way up to the sunshine, asking only for a chance to turn the light into sugar? Was it ever a cultivar, or is it somehow wild and indigenous? It certainly was low lying with no care to stake it upright or craft an arbor from which to hang. It was definitely losing the battle, having to lie low and creep around and through and up its' stronger neighbors in order to survive at all. The thickest part of what I cut was no bigger than one of my fingers. What a gallant creeper, fighting against all hope for who knows how many years - and I come out and cut it to shit.

While lopping I eventually recognized the root stock point whence all the rest of the climber came with the thought of returning later to dig it out or poison it. For now I can take some small comfort from knowing grape stock really doesn't perish from a hack job, in fact it can be healthy. And maybe over the coming years Gilbert may come back and forgive me if I work at it.

There was only the one small berry. I would have eaten it to be sure. But this one had a worm.

-Phillip