Over a half decade ago, we imagine, a young man, hired for the summer by Cullen's Builders, was charged with installing the landscaping cloth and stone in the low-maintenance gardens around mother's new house.
Cheater exposed
He probably had a date that night and was in a hurry to complete a task deemed beneath himself. The thick layer of stones would easily hide a sloppy, slap-dash job of stretching plastic to meet the edges. It would be years before the weeds would find the massive gaps between edging and the plastic sheets, but by then he'd be long gone, he reasoned, and finishing dental school.
So the lazy summer gardener is now a dentist, cheating his patients on the gold content of their fillings.
Mother's weeds are now thick enough to earn a notation in the official neighborhood association meeting minutes.
No killer
You can always just kill the weeds with a fine chemical product called Roundup, but this only buys a little time until the next crop. What is required is major surgery, removing the rocks, rooting the dirt and patching the plastic gaps the way it should have been done years ago.
This we did on a good Friday. Under a glorious sun, we knelt down, exposed the lies, the sins of omission, the cover-up. We removed the rocks, shook the dirt off, separated out the pig weed, the threw the dirt onto the adjacent sod.
Just that very morning the Lake Region Echo-Press had delivered unto us a free copy of its County Shopper.
We pressed this into immediate service and to its highest use: hard-working weed blocker, guaranteed to hold up at least 20 years before breaking down. (Look this up -- at least one neighbor and one brother shook their heads and said we should use plastic, not newspaper. Uff Da. Look up chapter and verse in your recycler's prayer book.)
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As we refilled the saved stone onto the clean newsprint, we took satisfaction in a difficult job well done and in a mood of generosity, forgave the sloppy landscaping engineer. Our late Uncle Halvor would have described his work as "Peter Tumbledown," and would often point out the folly of building a crooked fence, not mouse-proofing a granary, or skimping on oil in the crankcase.
He would have approved Friday's reconstruction and we thought of him as we finished up.
Satisfied, we looked across the sidewalk at the next flowerbed. It, too, was a swamp of pigweed hiding a secret past. But the sun was high now, our knees were sore, our spirit flagging.
We got out the Roundup.
