The Undoing

Once I started I couldn't stop. I lopped off branches and threw them in a pile off to the side. I yanked at long vines that were tangled up amongst the other plants. Sweat soaked through my shirt. It was over 90 degrees and humid and the shade had been gone for hours. I could feel my shoulders starting to burn. I was knee deep in undergrowth and I tried not to think about the summer's spider infestation. My daughter looked up from the porch stoop where she was making umbrellas out of twigs and leaves for her bug cafe. “Mom, what are you doing?”

I wasn't even supposed to be here. I had expected to be gone by now, that had been our agreement. This place was too big for me, too much house, too much sweeping yard for one person to keep up, and then caring for the kids on top of that.

“You're cutting off all the green stuff.”

“Not all of it,” I said. After I had been at it for an hour I uncovered the plants I had put in the first year. Tiger lilies and day lilies. My feeble effort to make it feel like a country garden. I would dig up the bulbs and take them with me when I left.

By this time I was finding plants I didn't even know were there. Volunteers that had taken root and sprouted up amongst the weeds. A volunteer tree for god's sake. It was three feet tall. And there were the juniper bushes the builders had planted. They had died years ago and the forsythia had just grown up and over them. I got a shovel and started digging them out.

The evening was drawing near. I was exhausted. I wanted to collapse. It wasn't an option. I had to keep going. My son picked up a pair of clippers and got down in the muck with me. He wanted to help. I pointed out small limbs he could cut. I tried to keep my mind on the task at hand, tried for the hundredth time not to think of it, that thing which felt like a knife through the very center of me. My kids would talk to me and I'd have to repeat their words in my mind, focus hard.

As I made my way to the back of the forsythia bush, clipping off branches, two birds flew out and then another. I stopped. I looked closer. After a minute I saw it. I called the kids over and held them up one at a time so they could see too. Tucked deep in the branches was a bird's nest. I backed off and worked quietly around the nest, trying to trim back the bush yet not to disturb their home.

It had all started the other day when my eyes fell upon the landscaped area between the walkway and the front of the house and it looked awful. It had looked awful for the whole summer, unkempt and overgrown – I'm sure we were the bane of the neighborhood association – but I had never cared until now. Suddenly I couldn't bear to look at it. Suddenly I couldn't walk by and not see it.

I devoted most of a Sunday to the project. I pulled every weed. Cut back all the bushes. Six wheelbarrow loads piled high and dumped back in the woods. When it was done, I stepped back and surveyed my work. There was no mistaking. It looked like shit. But 100% better than when I started.

What I noticed was this, that when I looked at it, I felt like I could breathe. And every day, when I drove up to the house and my eyes fell upon it, I felt like I could breathe. It made me feel a little freer.

There was still one stump, however, I had not been able to remove. It's roots were particularly deep and they were tangled up with the roots of other live plants that I didn't want to destroy. I had worked for a long time to try to get it out and finally given up. A week later, I returned. By this time, the weather was cooler. A light rain was beginning to fall. I drove the shovel into the earth, again and again, trying to get to the bottom of this thing. I pulled at it and pulled and it clung fast to the earth. The rain was falling harder. I continued to dig.

For a moment, I stopped and stood there in the rain and the new, raw emptiness of the garden and I rested my forehead on the end of the shovel. My hands were covered in dirt so I wiped my tears on my sleeve. It was just too much to take in. It had been there for the longest time and I hadn't seen it. Why hadn't I ever bothered to look? Right in front of my eyes, for fuck's sake. Had I only looked.  But then who would have ever thought?

The course of three lives, irrevocably altered.

After a moment, I got down on the ground and pulled at the heft of this dead thing and felt it give, finally, and slide out of the soil. The root system was huge; gnarled and ugly like a giant Medusa head. I hauled it up into the back, behind the treeline and hurled it as far as I could into the distance. I expected it to make a large crash when it landed but the ground was damp and the noise was more muted, something like the sound of wet leaves underfoot, or the crush of a child's fragile dream, or the soft gasp of the unbelieving at the sight of the truth finally laid bare.