Precious Memories

It’s not hard for the hidden memories to find us. Often just showing up in life wakes them up.

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Ah, April, the barefoot days of youth begin.
Who forgets? Memories persist, never die, though they lie buried,
Sleeping at peace in the inner chambers of our souls,
Like us, like nature, waiting to live again.

Flash-backs recollect and resurrect with taste:
A watermelon, thick, pale red, juicy, black seeds,
Transports back, relief from the heat of the day.
Mama’s call comes again, clearly resonates.

The blueberry patch, we ate more than we kept,
The strawberries, wet with dew,
The wild blackberries, thorns like barbed wire,
The cobbler worth the barbed conflict.

The fishing hole, the swimming pool,
And beach that stole our hours,
The secret climbs in sturdy oaks,
The bike rides up to town.

We stand in shadows, in the shade of a tall pine tree,
Matt and I, yesterday, in Woodbine, barely a town,
Caught in the same time warp as our memories.
Empty sidewalks, a vacuum of stifling heat. Nothing moves.

Around the corner they come. One bike, two boys.
One peddles, the other rides free, standing on the rear wheel struts.
Summer is getting closer, South Georgia at its best.
They own the road. They own the scene. They own the day.

Like cumulus clouds in motion slow they pass by unconcerned,
Going nowhere fast. Which may be the point of it all.
In shorts, shoeless, shirtless, oblivious, all they need to own,
No watch, no wallet, no wireless, no worry.

They will likely not recall this day, for memory seeps in slow.
They have today what we had in ours, freedom just to be.
Though they or we give little thought to what it means,
Still they know it, not in words, but in how it feels.

We feel it, too, the frosty Kool-Aid days of years gone by.
We hear a song, familiar, unforgotten, from a church far away,
“Precious memories, how they linger, how they ever flood my soul
In the stillness of the midnight, Precious, sacred scenes unfold.”

O, if only life were always so simple,
as in the barefoot days of our youth.



Bud Hearn
April 27, 2018

Tough as Nails

Goodbye Clint, you made our day. Hasta la vista, Arnold. Sorry, 007, your license to kill expired. The enemy is still among us…weeds.

It’s time weeds get some respect. Common as dirt. Indestructible. Permanent eradication is impossible. They scoff at Roundup. They drink chemicals for champagne cocktails. They eat lawns with impunity and laugh gardeners to scorn.

Weeds are smart. They find feasts in newly planted furrows. The fallow field chorus begins when the tiller arrives. They sing, “Mine eyes hath seen the coming of the tractor with the plow.…” They have no fear.

In nature, nothing rivals the resilience of weeds. Unless it’s rocks. Which is why boulders abound in vineyards. They ooze minerals, steroidal leachate stronger than ‘T’ injections. They consort with nematodes, those round earthworms that gobble grass and glorify weeds. Yes, nematodes caress all carcasses. They’ll gorge on yours one day.

Rocks and nematodes are both in a covert conspiracy with weeds. Their subversive activities seek to conquer the world. Look around. Wherever they are seen, nature will soon be reclaimed. Check out a ditch. They thrive undisturbed. Mow ‘em, torch ‘em, spray ‘em…they’ll be back tomorrow.

I sometimes dream of being a weed, not a rock or worm. Rocks are boring sloths. They just lie around like slobs, adding little and getting in the way. Reminds me of some people I know. But not weeds. No sir. Weeds, like worms and rocks, are relentless and invincible invaders. Give ‘em an inch of ground and you’ll lose the battle.

This is a photo of a dandelion. It’s thriving between the inhospitable cracks of flagstone. It appears happier than most people. That’s assuming weeds can express such emotion. It seems to smile, even gloat, sorta like the Baptist preacher holding four aces at the Friday night poker game.

We bought our first house in 1969, a cute cottage in a neatly groomed subdivision. Neighbors’ lawns were pristine and stood as straight as a Butch-Waxed flat-top haircut. Except ours. Who has time to mow a lawn while changing diapers and paying bills? So what happened? A gang of subversive dandelions took root in the weed patch we called our front lawn. I knew our tenure would be short there. I recognized immediately the negotiation value of weeds.

Mr. Frank was our neighbor. He was a weed-control fanatic. He attempted to tutor me on proper lawn maintenance and neighborhood protocol. He was obsessed with my demonic dandelions. They eyeballed his luscious Zoysia, contemplating marriage. Like a teenager in heat, they encroached on their prey by stealth, inch by inch. Which is a perfectly reasonable thing for dandelions to do. Like the little man in Moscow, exploitation of vulnerable territory is in the nature of weeds and worms. Nowhere is off limits.

In retrospect, I think my knee-high dandelions drove Mr. Frank to drink. One hot day in August it all came to a head. He had to be talked down from the roof with my promise to retard the advance of dandelions. Our relationship went downhill from there when he built the wall. We soon packed up our dandelions and moved. Will Mexico do likewise?

Weeds don’t deserve the bad rap they’re getting. Weeds welcomed Adam and his bride when they wandered outside of Eden. There is a bias in nature in favor of thorns and thistles, not cultivated gardens. That’s why I choose to side with weeds…they’re the long-term winning team.

There’s a frail but beautiful elegance to weeds. Walk almost anywhere…there they are, these reviled botanical survivors. I pity them. Their tiny flowers are exquisite miniatures of expensive hot-house varieties. Flowers of weeds are free.

Metaphorically speaking, weeds are like the details of life that disrupt our inordinate compulsion for orderly control. We seek ease, avoidance, amusement…weeds remind us that life’s not like that. Left to themselves, details, like weeds, will colonize all carefully crafted gardens of grace and security.

Weeds remind us that life is still wild by nature. It’s bloody, tooth and nail. The instructive virtue of weeds supports the maxim, “The price of liberty is eternal vigilance.”

All flesh is like grass, folks. All its glory is like the flower of grass. Here today, gone tomorrow. But not weeds. Oh, if only we were as resilient as the dandelion….



Bud Hearn
April 13, 2018