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Life Is What Repeats
I was bent over in the yard with my shovel in my hands, prying a thistle out of the grass, when the thought came to me: Didn’t I just do this?
The roots of thistles always run deep before the plant has hardly broken the surface. I pushed the shovel into the rocky West Jordan soil, twisted, then pulled. There’s no saving the grass around a thistle. If you want it gone, some grass and dirt are necessary casualties to get rid of the noxious plant.
I felt like I cleared the same spot of lawn last week. And what seemed like the week before that. And the week before that.
Thistles are persistent. It seems that no matter how often I dig them out, they figure out how to come back, mocking the momentary sense of accomplishment.
I don’t like yardwork. It’s one of those things I rush through as fast as I can just to get it over with. Close enough is good enough — except that’s what leaves space for the weeds to come back faster.
Yesterday, I’d just come back from a run when I set to work in the yard. Maybe it was because I was tired from the run that I lingered just a little longer, leaning on my shovel with a large bucket of weeds by my side.
The narrative that usually plays in my brain about yardwork echoes the words of Mr. Incredible from The Incredibles: Didn’t I just fix this? Why can’t…
