I find myself outside sitting on the gravel driveway in a dress at 8:30pm on a Sunday pulling crabgrass out from between the stones. It’s so dark I can hardly see, but I persist. It’s been an unconventionally hot and humid summer in Virginia and the plants are threatening to take back our house. I can’t say that I blame them since we excavated so many of their friends to put it here in the first place. I sit here on the rocks weeding, an exercise in complete and utter futility, because it gives me the smallest sliver of feeling in control of something in my life. My mind wanders to climate change and curses the systems that have created it and really all systems in general because when has anyone ever looked at one and thought, “Wow, what a big, beautiful system.”?
Yet dare I say anything based on science, on research, on god forbid empathy lest I gain myself a scarlet letter faster than people having sex with actual children? Than people blocking food and aid to entire groups of fellow humans? When a statement of solidarity in my business earns me a phone call from a concerned customer with plenty of unsolicited advice? I call him back on a Monday morning because it’s never too early in the week for mansplaining. “Let me tell you some things about running a business here… ” he says. “It’s really best to leave politics out of it,” he says. He works in customer service too, he assures me - he knows what a bad review can do, the threat palpable. “I want peace as much as the next person,” he says. Does he?
I take down the sign and hang it where he can’t see and feel like the biggest coward I know. Then I donate a portion of his purchases to what I assume are the last organizations they’d support. I hire a friend to paint a mural there so we can write our values and beliefs under the paint as an act of resistance. It hardly feels like a drop in the bucket but at least feels like I’m doing something. I’ve discovered that covert action is my flavor of activism and where I may be the most effective - or perhaps I am just telling myself that to assuage my guilt and complicity.
Summer is relentless this year. It’s too hot to go down the slides at the playground, so instead we spend the morning killing lantern flies at the playground like it’s an Olympic sport, my niece apologizing as she grinds one into the mulch, “I’m sorry, better luck in your next life.” We forage for mushrooms on hikes in an attempt to reconnect with the earth but all I can think about is how to smuggle a poisonous one into someone else’s meal. “I used to be a pacifist,” I think. We tamp down the urge to scream at our children to “eat the fucking food on your plate! Don’t you know there are thousands of starving children in Gaza? You have no idea how lucky you are.”
We take perimenopausal supplements till our throats reject the putrid powders spilling out of their capsules, in an attempt to keep the rage and tears at bay. We watch The Handmaid's Tale and question when it will be our reality.
We eat our veggies, go to therapy, sort our recycling, compost, buy secondhand, and carpool, while wondering just how pointless it all really is. We question our sanity for choosing to bring another life into a world like this, yet assume it’s always been this way and we just weren’t aware until it was blasted into our eyes and brains by the algorithms. We do our best raising our children while tamping down our anxiety about school boards who are more concerned about protecting heteronormativity than the students’ unmet emotional and social needs that end in mass shootings.
We worry about how to care for our aging parents who have been taught to deny their own needs in the service of others. We talk in circles, blame our chronic back pain on them, and resist the urge to beat our head against the wall. We look in the mirror and wonder when our hair turned so gray and at what point we will be just like them. We strategize about how to plan for the future to avoid doing the same thing to our own children. We scream alone in our cars until our throats burn just to be able to feel something again.
We work ourselves to the bone to make ends meet and create payment plans for our medical expenses while our taxes we pay diligently fund things we never agreed to. We sign countless petitions at stoplights, donate when we can, and berate ourselves for all of the protests missed and the fear that bubbles up at even the thought of calling our representatives. We try to find inspiration to continue our artistic practices but have never felt less inspired. We are doing so, so much and none of it well.
And yet here I am pulling the damn weeds again because they are persistent little bastards. And they remind me to continue growing. To search for the light in the most unlikely of places. To hold my head up to the sky and face another day. And to offer my hope and love to the world with the tenacity of a weed in a tropical July in Virginia.
Photo credit to Jon Styer, the one keeping me tethered and the only one who remembers to change the batteries in his headlamp before a sunset hike.