An unusually wet July and August have done wonders for the khaki weed harvest. Crop yields are way up. Unfortunately, prices are way down, and at Gatewood Farms (that’s me), they’re actually throwing the stuff away. Normally, the harvest is over by now because a successful extraction means getting a complete root and at this point in the summer the ground is too hard and dry. Fairly consistent late summer rains, however, mean plants still come up with ease. But it’s mostly small patches, these days.

This is quite a change from the start of the project, in 2017 or so. Back then the weed covered the ground almost completely and a season worth of digging would only clear a few square feet. I’d attack it the next season and on it went. All the while, I was cursing the lack of attention that let it get started in the first place. Gradually, however, I began to win the war, and now, my digging is mostly remedial. It can still be hard, because the plant puts down a lot of seeds, but it’s one or two days, rather than a month or two of daily work in the spring.

As I did a small patch yesterday, discovered in the back yard, I realized something else had changed. It was no longer, how did I let this get started, it was just, oh, here’s one. I’d moved on from living in the past of my inattention to the weed; I was living with it, in the moment. It was just something I’d experienced, there, but not all encompassing. And my grief is starting to feel that way, too. Hard years of watching, as my wife diminished, a hard year of aftermath when she died, and now a more peaceful acceptance of my old companion, death, a new piece of me, my past. And if the prepositions have changed from in to with, then so has the verb, from I was to, I am. I am here. We were there. And that’s the past I now live with today. It will always be a part of me. And with that, on we will go.

John W. Wilson is the author of The Long Goodbye: A Caregiver’s Tale.