the garden of good and evil

Labor Day.


America's answer to the Euro-centric red May Day.


The unofficial start of political campaigns -- as if they ever stopped.


The last day before the kiddos head back to school -- the unofficial end of summer.


None of that really interested me this year.  I am not a laborite -- red or otherwise.  I long ago gave up any interest in politics.  And the lack of children in my household makes any gleeful thoughts of back-to-school rather churlish -- if not merely mad.


Instead, I celebrated my unpaid day away from work with -- work.  Yard work, to be more precise.


I have a lawn service that does a very good job of taking care of my lawn.  But there are always those pesky borders where weeds invade with impunity.


The border beds have gone untended for the full year I was in Mexico -- and for most of the past few months while I was hobbled inside.  They are not a pretty sight.


Thistles.  Blackberries.  Dandelions.  Violets.  Oxalis.  Some old foes.  Some new ones.


I should have started the war in the spring.  But that is the common complaint of every ancient general.  Most of the weeds have already gone to seed.  And the next generation is just waiting for me to leave.


A rational mind would decide to wait until next spring.  Not me.  It was Labor Day -- and there was labor to be expended.


Armed with my orange-handled trowel and my favorite pair of shears, I hacked my way through more jungle than Henry Stanley encountered in his search for Livingston.  Most of the battles were hand-to-stem -- with row after row of weeds falling to what passed for obsessive tenacity.


I eventually stopped when the recycle barrel was full.  In a less green time, I would have lit a fire and taken on another patch of weedy land.  But we live in a kinder and gentler time -- where our neighbors are spared the white smoke of smoldering weeds.


I plopped the barrel back in place on the concrete pad next to my house.  And I quickly discovered why I had been stung while pulling the ivy on the fence in that area. 


The rumble of the wheeled barrel sent up a small swarm of Western yellow jackets.  They had managed to dig a tunnel in the dirt abutting the pad -- giving them a Frank Lloyd Wright-inspired cantilevered concrete roof.


But they were not happy I was playing Santa Claus on their roof.  When the flight died down, I stuffed the garden hose down the hole and tried flooding them out.  It seemed another green solution.  But it was just as unsuccessful.

 

If the nest was somewhere on the property away from activity, I would leave them alone.  But their presence is an inconvenient truth that must come to, what a friend of mine termed, "an Irish, not an American ending."


Tomorrow I will seek chemical assistance -- stand-off wasp spray.  Until then, I will allow a short period of detente. 


As for me, the Labor Day is over.  Tomorrow I will return to my short-term job.


But, at least, my borders are now in better shape than some national ones.