Fleeting Wor(l)ds

To my parents. To Nathalie. To Jean. To Christian.

Life is like a garden… It starts with fresh grass, untouched and green.

Actually, it even starts before that! It starts in the depth, it starts in darkness. It starts when your roots intertwine, when mum meets dad, when grandma meets grandpa. When all those strings blend. Way before one emerges.
From all those roots, a beautiful grass is born, full of future promises and unknown stories, invisible. It is only when they start to show up, sometimes treacherous, sometimes kind, you can actually make the difference between the nourishing ones and the blood suckers. But I am jumping ahead…

For now, you have your beautiful and fresh grass, untouched and green. You may decide it will be a French or an English garden, depending on if you are a control freak or a messy one.
Thus, new species appear. There are flowers you have thoroughly planted that quickly grow. There are seeds you have planted such a long time ago you have almost forgotten that suddenly become a bush or a tree. There are wildflowers you didn’t know about that surprise in spring. All those intertwine, blend and create a dance in summer time.

Unfortunately, in parallel of those surprises and success, some uninvited guests show up: wild grass. You often don’t pay attention, they look like wild flowers and you didn’t see them invisibly grow. However, because you are not sure of their nature, you let them grow a bit, to get an idea. Sometimes, you doubt too long; sometimes, you are afraid of what you would dig into. But halas, let’s be honest, you actually often don’t take time to deal with it…
You let it grow then, you close your eyes, you flit into another garden, until one day, you sharply glimpse at yours, you remember you left it behind and you are facing a wild forest, wild grass has taken over, you can’t even recognize who is who. You don’t have other choices, you have to start weeding! You furiously and impatiently get into the process, you cut whatever exceeds. You want to move on! You do an half-ass job, you hurry up, you don’t even make difference between grass and weed. And you sometimes stop at that point. You have pulled up a nice face, it almost looks like your first untouched garden. You might even plant some new seeds. And when you come back, you don’t understand why most of your new flowers are dead, suffocated. Why weeds have taken over instead. You thought you had dealt with the problem…

Kinda. Just on the surface…

And it keeps growing… Hungry. So you start all over again, for real this time, you will have to dig, you will have to uproot. And you get impatient because it takes way longer than ripping it off. Roots are sometimes insignificant, but more often intertwined with others. And when you uproot, you don’t have any other choices than damaging the first plant. Weeds have become part of your garden, they have become part of yourself.
It is getting clearer little by little though and you then realize that, under those giant weeds, were hiding smaller ones. You just freak out: “Enough is enough! I have already cleared out fucking Amazonia, I don’t want to deal with bloody tundra now!”
But in the same time, it looks messy, all those holes next to weeds. And if you want to plant anything new and beautiful, you are screwed, you have already experienced it: weed roots grew back and your fertilizer fed the weeds instead of your flowers. You don’t want to start all over again! Therefore, even if you are exhausted, even if you wished you could stop digging, you keep going, you keep sweating… You clear up bushes.

You really want to achieve it but you are bleached. You can’t finish this giant weeding, you can’t go deeper, you need a truce. Weeds always come back like bitter tears. You might quit because it became too complicated, or painful; your muscles aches. Your heart as well.
Your whole garden keep fallow, it is Northern France after the great War, it is a burnt land. You can’t do anything anymore, neither planting nor finishing your clean up. Of course, after a while, it starts to grow a bit. It is your signal, you won’t be fooled gain. You are ready for the final clear up. This little gap of time has helped you to recover, to comprehend the process, you know you have to take your time, use the good tools, not the ridiculous little red fork you lost. No mercy! No bad root will survive.
And your understand you can’t force the elements, you can’t plant in fall and hopping to grow during winter, you know you will have to wait until the end before seeding the smallest daisy. You take your time this time. You use the giant fork to move the ground. You start to enjoy the process. You are sometimes surprised when a weed’s root intertwined with a bush’s. You soon realize weeding was helpless. The heart of the problem was buried underneath, in those giant roots that you have now untangled and reveal you the truth: weeds actually took roots in the native root, the one that gave birth to your garden. Weeds took advantage of cracks and weakness and wounds to jeopardize the entire garden.

Once you have uprooted everything, you can heal the native root though, give the needed nutriments heal the scars, cut the dying parts, before burying it back to where it belongs. You will know, for the next time, where to look for the problem if new fire weeds dared to take over prevention.
You get an earth-lift, you choose what you give away and what you keep, even some weeds. Because they are like cherished scars, they tell a story, and mixed with the flower you grew, the one that grew you, the one your parents left there, it is a beautiful bouquet.

And in front of this untouched land in some places, blossomed elsewhere, wounded a bit, you are finally ready to start your new garden. Relieved.

Justine T.Annezo – Nov. 21st 2019, Cowichan Bay (BC) – GMT -8