For the last few weeks, I've known my garden was overrun with weeds. I'm sure it had been steadily getting worse, I must have seen it before then, but I had largely been keeping it from my mind. Sometime during the fall, the last stalks of the mustard greens had dried up with their rattling seed pods intact and I had managed to lie to myself till nearly the end of winter about my plans to harvest the seeds. In the meantime, everything I had planted was lost under the tall grasses.
These are the things I do when I'm overwhelmed. I push things out of my mind; anything not in my top-five priorities at the moment gets put on hold: "sorry, all our operators are currently attending other crises, please stay on hold and someone will be there to assist you shortly." Sometimes, I can manage a distraction or two, but it's always a habitual one, like Twitter or installing some obsolete operating system. I don't call my family, I skip meals, and I *definitely* don't tend to my garden.
On Friday, I resigned from DSA SF's Steering Committee. My reasoning for this is complex and deals with a lot of internal conflict that people who aren't members of the org would assuredly find baffling. But it essentially boiled down to the fact that I was worn out, and I needed to not be worn out anymore. The garden was evidence of that, grass growing up to my shoulders, taunting me whenever I walked into the side yard.
So, on Sunday, I got to work. Gloves on, garden boots, clothes I didn't mind getting covered in mud. My partner was playing video games when I came in after my first survey and I told her I may have to start over. There were herbs I wanted to save, but the weeds just seemed like they were too much to handle. Regardless, I got to work, and tried to salvage what I could. After an hour, there was a pile of plant detritus up to my thighs, and I was starting to see the things I had left neglected for nine months. New mustard greens and arugula were coming in; I ripped off a leaf and tasted it, vaguely peppery.
The lemon balm had even managed to spread in the shadows, crowding out the spearmint to get at whatever sunlight it could in the shade of the weeds. I smelled it before I saw it, a citrus scent that cut through the muddy smell of dirt. More digging to realize the spearmint was lost, but with another mint plant growing in a different part of the yard, this was a loss I could stomach. After clearing more grass, the lavender appeared, pale, struggling, but present. The raspberry bush lost most of its lower leaves in the weeds' shade, but they were starting to grow new ones above it.
Most everything was saved. I felt guilty for the last season's neglect, but there's a warmth that settled over me when I realized how little was truly gone. This week's schedule includes plans with friends I haven't seen in months; I suppose I’m hoping for more lemon balm than spearmint.
Some interesting things:
I’ve been playing lately with Mac-A-Mug, a software used to generate faces on Macs circa 1986. Check it out in an emulator here. It’s inspired me to put together a small piece of art using it + Hypercard, look forward to that by the end of the month.
I’m growing some plants inside a Mac Pro. I hope it works!
This is also published on my Gopher blog. Gopher is a hypertext technology from the early 90s that was taking off around the same time as the web, though the web eventually surpassed it. SDF maintains a ton of great Gopher blogs (or “phlogs”) and mine is one of them. It’s worth checking out! I will almost certainly write something about Gopher in the near future.