pulling up weeds

Am I seriously going to post about weeds on a Tuesday?  The day where I try to join in with emily and others at chatting at the sky and celebrate everyday gifts?

Yes, I am.  And I thought I was pushing it celebrating laundry a few weeks back...

Last night, I was a weeding machine. (OK, that might be a huge overstatement, but let's go with it.)

We have a large mulch area around our patio that I may or may not plant something pretty in one day.  In the meantime, the grass grows in it very well.  Our yard is struggling to green up this year, but large tufts of very green grass are thriving in the mulch bed.  Have you ever tried pulling up grass?  It is all connected by a web of underground roots.  It doesn't just come straight up.  A week or so ago, Bubba and I made an early Saturday morning of starting the job of getting the grass out of there.  We made progress but there was a long way to go.  I kept meaning to get back to it...but hadn't yet.

Yesterday was HOT--record breaking heat in Colorado.  We don't have air-conditioning (not that unusual here, but yesterday was one of those days you wonder why...) so we ate our dinner outside on the patio.  Our patio is cool in the evenings--something I love about our home.  After dinner, we sat around chatting for awhile.  As we talked, I pulled a tuft or two of grass.  No plans to weed that evening.

But I didn't stop.  My family disappeared.  I had no gloves, was still wearing a skirt, and was wearing hubby's way-too big-for-me flip flops.  (I took them from him for a "sec" cause I was barefoot).  I was definitely making a strong weeding fashion statement.  If I stopped to go get my stool to sit on or to change my clothes, I probably wouldn't have come back to the job.  I just kept pulling.

part of the pile of grass and roots I left in my wake...

And I finished the whole mulch bed!!! Just kidding--do you KNOW how long that will take?  But I kicked it's butt--and the grass that still lives in the bed is seriously afraid of me now.

And I enjoyed it.  Not the weeding per se, but the cooler evening weather, the slight breeze, the burst of drive I was feeling when I didn't "have to" but wanted to.  I enjoyed the satisfaction of seeing not only tufts of grass come up, but long roots that were connected to other tufts of grass.  And the quiet.  And after a day of lots of thinking at work--the mindless task of pulling grass.

I was able to reflect--thinking things like:

It doesn't do any good to just get rid of what others can see...the roots need to be dealt with if we want to really tackle the problem.  Hmmmm.

We want green grass in most of our yard.  But green grass in the mulch area is no longer grass, it's weeds.  The right thing in the wrong place is no longer the right thing.  Double-hmmmm.

So today I am celebrating a small burst of desire to weed, the satisfaction of working with my hands instead of my brain, and a quiet, cool hour of reflection.

Even if I was less than lady-like squatting in my skirt, with dirt in my fingernails and wearing way-too-big shoes.