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Over The Hedge
We labor in the backyard, weeding, pulling stones like tumors up from the hardened clay, lumpy ogre-piles of rock-clod-weed: scare-crowish. Back to bent back, we are tin-foil and matchstick, stooped over our rakes like Van Gogh's long dead Hay Makers, though maybe happier in our work, work that brings forth little more than a few ratty tomatoes, knobby volunteer potatoes, the odd renegade squash. We leave in the wild carrots and hollow onion stalks, dead-head the gangly rogue rose we've grown to love like a headstrong adolescent boy. It's mostly exercise for the quickly aging here: fresh air, a loss of self-consciousness, to be without thought among the reedy weeds, brushing gnats front our eyes, pollen- fingered, followed by bursts of orgiastic sneezing, stopping us in our tracks. We tug up feeder root saplings, knowing in some distant way that without us this garden will, in a few untended years, become a forest of oak and ash, the lilac, thriving now, will become stunted, shriveled, curled up like an old woman in the deadly hemlock shade. This patch of grass we stand in, freshly mown, will dwindle to a few scruffy tufts, and the porch with its new coat of off-white paint is really nothing more than a future ladder for the un-removable morning glory. And the ivy will crawl down from its banks in a slow green wave to cover the driveway's broken shore, then climb our shingled house, growing over the windows we washed just last week, one inside, one out, rags in our hands, working circles in tandem, making faces at each other through the glass.
Dorianne Laux
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:hi:
RL
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