My Fight To The Death With Plants

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Not many people understand when I tell them that I'm presently occupied doing what I wanted to do for most of my life. I've got an inside place to be in order to say what I see in my mind's eye without interruption. It's probably true that I couldn't have foreseen where it would lead me.

It's like that quote of a Tibetan lama who was asked what he had learned from living in isolation for the past twenty years. His response was that "Death always comes unexpected." His point, as I interpreted it, might have been that a seeker can't plan for the event of their own death if they don't have a clue when it will happen.

To reframe, in a way, it can also be said that life is always unexpected. I never expected to live as long as I have, but despite all, I ain't dead yet. In the past I have claimed that I made decisions that sometime flirted with death. Now I'm not so sure the options I chose from meant what I once thought they did.

More often than not I find myself dealing with health problems I didn't anticipate. The other day I was working along the lane from the paved road that leads to me and my brother's houses. The lane runs north to south from the paved road, so that puts the west side of the lane facing the morning sun and any plants or bushes that grow there are thick as thieves.

The fact that I've had problems with these specific kinds of plants for most of my life can't possibly be coincidental. The main culprit is a plant used for landscaping. It's a shrubbery bush gone wild all over the place. It takes over the area it grows and shades every other plant out of existence. I don't know the formal name for it, but I wanna call it boxwood.

Another prolific plant that grows on the edge of the boxwood plant is multiflora rose used to make living fences. The thorns are very invasive and rip at one's flesh. My father mistakenly imported this plant because it was recommended by his mentors up to the State University Agricultural College, and he decided to lead the way for the area farmers to follow. It went wild too.

The other plant involved in this hodgepodge of plants that line the west side of the lane that leads to my house is what the local folk call a China berry tree. Apparently, from the brief research I just did, the Chinaberry tree is not just local here, but an invasive non-native plant that's taking over the world:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melia_azedarach

This tree and I have a history, and I'm almost positive it found out where I live and set up residence to plague me some more. The history part of it happened when my natal family lived about fifty miles east of here in a yellow house my parents rented.

This house was on the corner of the main highway that passed through this small, coastal plains town, and a lane that crossed in front of it that was only about a half-mile long. The house was built in an "L" shape with the long parts of the "L" facing these two public thoroughfares. That put the inside of the "L" in the back of the house and offered the only privacy the place afforded.

The Chinaberry trees grew in a straight line from the small lane parallel to the house and along with some shrubbery provided a little nook for my family. Practically all the outside activities centered around this spot in what we called the backyard.

What happened was that I liked to climb in these trees. I may have been warned that the limbs of a Chinaberry tree are pulpy on the inside, and snap into quite easily. When they break, they break completely into two parts with no splintering to slow the process down. I found this out for sure one day when I climbed out too far on one of the Chinaberry limbs.

Down I came with no advanced warning, and landed flat on my back. The fall knocked the breath out of me, and it also paralyzed me for a moment or two. I couldn't breath and I couldn't move. I thought for sure I was dead. That's as much as I knew about death at the time. I was suddenly rendered helpless, so I must be dead.

The combination of Chinaberry trees, boxwood shrubbery plants gone wild, and my father's imported multiflora rose that was originally planted over a mile away, caused me to hurt myself while I was trying to get some control over their attempt to eradicate my driveway.

I hurt myself with a pair of pruning shears that have turned out to be one of my useful tools for preventing the plants around my house from eating my house and me alive. The handles are about two feet long, and there is an extra leverage system built into them so larger limbs can be lopped off with less strength.

According to the type of wood I'm trying to shear off, I can cut limbs and small saplings up to two inches thick. Not the boxwood bushes though. They are tough and difficult to lop off. That's how I hurt myself. I tried to cut through a boxwood branch about an inch and a half thick (3.80 cm), and the angle I had for squeezing the handles on my pruning shears was at a lousy angle.

That's when I made the mistake of bracing one of the handles against my chest, and using both hands on the other handle to try and get the limb sheared through. Instead I fractured a rib or two in my upper chest. It hurt really bad and prophetically at the same time. I.E., I knew when it happened it was a stupid thing to do, and I was gonna pay for my dumb ass ways for a long time.

I stopped working and went to Lowe's to buy the pruning saw I'd checked out previously. My brother next door had one he'd loan me for a small job, but I had too much work I wanted to get done to dull his saw, so I bought my own. The saw wasn't cheap, and I am is a miser. Hurting myself made me more reasonable real fast.

It's been over a week since that incident happened. I started to write "since that accident happened", but it wasn't exactly an accident. It was those plants trying to kill me to keep me from killing them. They'll win in the end. At least against me. I will go back out there when I'm up to it, and I will control their growth to keep the entrance to my house clear. For a while, and then I'll die, and they will conquer all until they're conquered. Ain't life grand?

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