Weedbank
Some friends get out of the city and move into a new subdivision in Canal Winchester, or Powell, or Obetz. The house stands in the middle of bare earth and bulldozers, pipes and weeds sprouting at random throughout. They can see enough of what they think will be that they can edit out the rest, with faith that the loops of road around them will bloom with new townhomes. This has been a good country for faith, and for will, and for faith in will to carry the day.
Time now to look down at the footprints of will, and the plantains sprouting out of them; the great sum of externalities half-buried in the wake. The asphalt’s binder washes away, and the seeds paved under reappear as shoots of horseweed. The people paved under reappear as flashes of tarp in the woods. As the repressed returns, you edit it out; but the mental load of the background edits starts to compound, and your confidence starts to lag. “We will get to that,” in time, until you don’t. When enough problems bloom, you find that for all that your talk of home, of putting down roots, you would be happier to drift off and find a safer niche. But then for all your scouting the niches seem to have been paved over; and your mortgage is underwater.
You scratch deeper, you pour in sweat. Hid out back, chickens in a scrap coop, marijuana under an eave – the eggs get ever more precious, the marijuana ever cheaper. Out front, the lawns fill with dead nettle, the flower boxes with vetch, the medians with purslane. The past waits right where you left it, as the future erodes away from its surface. One wag writes in 1867:
Many a time, when weary with our day’s labor and seeking our couch to enjoy a healthy sleep, has our nasal protuberance been regaled with a delicious whiff of the fragrant dog-fennel growing so luxuriously on the street…As raisists of the Canadian thistle, the citizens of Columbus are without equals in the world…Not a vacant lot but where its wonderfully armed leaves may be seen…Our city now needs but a liberal policy in planting burdock to be perfect in floral treasures.
As the situation gets worse, as all improvements are priced out, the will of the improving mind sours to a sorrel leaf. Its lone reward, if it chooses to claim it, is to finally look at what it has seen all along. To not substitute the grand old river for the river you look into, dammed with plastic sheets and bubbling with Asian carp. To not substitute the new on-ramp for the acres of concrete joints laying where the park had been. To see the world around you for the show lot it had always been, with new things always being trucked in and stacked, old things trucked away, a staff paid to clean and cut life away, and that staff ever dwindling, and life ever urging its way between, up through the splitting palettes.