In everyday life your eyes sweep back and forth taking in broad, surficial information. You analyze myriad things as aggregates and pay little attention to them. If you sit on the ground to pull weeds, you begin in this same mode of observation but settle quickly into focus, seeing individual things in detail, noticing the differences and not the similarities. You come to realize, after a few minutes, that your lawn is a veritable micro-jungle, crawling and teeming with animal and plant life. When you first notice that there are no fewer than dozens of tiny insects crawling and hopping and flying near you, under you and on you, it's a little disconcerting. You could get freaked out, I guess, and hop up. As for me though, I always make a decision to participate. I decide to be another creature in this teeming parade of activity. That's when I notice him, moving bricks around behind the shed. He's making noise, but somehow I overlooked him until now. He's sneaky.
"What are you doing back there, Chuck?"
He peeks around the corner of the shed. "Hello," he says, and nods slightly. He's not wearing his hat, and his curly hair is tousled from his efforts. He ducks back and continues working, making such a racket, rustling around, grunting and mumbling, even humming every now and then. It's funny. I decide to keep working.
There is a type of weed, a small, leafy vine, which impresses me. It grows, presumably from a seed, for less than an inch, and then puts down new roots. It then branches in multiple directions, grows less than an inch in each direction, and puts down roots. From each of those roots it branches in multiple directions and continues the process. It's not a large plant, but it's amazingly robust. I can try and try to remove it, but some small part of it will probably remain and it will grow back. I find myself wondering how a human might come to be this robust.
"This dirt is a problem," he says, startling me. He's standing by the trampoline, looking at the bare, sandy ground under it where I've pulled all the weeds.
"I can't get grass to grow there, and the weeds were too ugly, so I pulled them."
He turns toward me, "Bare dirt will wash away easily. The ground can get sick, also."
"I'm thinking about putting mulch, like pine chips, under there."
"We should plant something. It was better before." I guess weeds don't bother him.
"Well, I can plant some ground cover there, something that likes shade."
He walks under the trampoline, bends downs, and starts to feel the sandy soil with his hands. "Hmmm," he says. "You should," he says. He stands up and comes to sit beside me. We've not talked in a while. He follows me around as I move the wheelbarrow and pull weeds around the yard. At one point he lies down on the pile of pulled weeds in the wheel barrow. We talk about all sorts of things, but I've come to understand that I must keep something just between the two of us.
Later on, when it's evening and I have to go inside, he wanders off behind the shed and is gone. I glance back there to see what he was up to earlier. Everything looks exactly like it has always looked. "Hmmm," I say, and I turn to go into the house.
