Attainable Goal
I spent most of the morning yesterday, in the battle with Khaki weed, on my knees, digging. I think we’re at the end game. When I started four years ago, I was faced with dense batches of the nasty weed. I measured my gains in inches and in most years, I just had to stop because it got too hot. Summer came and ended the game. I’d let the grass grow and wait ‘till next year. I wasn’t getting all the weeds, but I was clearing out new seed generators.
Now days, I’m pulling stragglers and rather than dense patches these are singles who somehow survived the previous year’s pulls or were left behind seeds. That’s okay. As I said before, in previous years, I could literally kneel in the same area for hours as I pulled. Now days I can walk the yard and find them. They’ve become part of the cycle of life, weeds of the new season, to be pulled as needed.
I wonder what it says about the life I’ve lived that at the end of my career and in the final stage of my life, I take pleasure in pulling weeds, or that I consider it worth writing about? It’s a puzzle for sure. All I know, however, is that between all the big stuff, the promotions and awards and degrees, life was mostly spent on the small stuff, the things that go in between. And maybe finding a way to deal with it, is what provided a cushion for any fall I might take when reaching for the big stuff. And that doing it now will allow me to exit the stage with a sense of contentment. An attainable goal.
John W. Wilson is the author of The Long Goodbye: A Caregiver’s Tale