Greening?

That’s what I queried aloud yesterday morning when I looked across at the dry brown grass on my way to the compost heap with a bucket of dishwater. There was some annoyance in my tone, for the green means the spread of milkweed, and I do not like its smell.

You will notice that this conversation with myself is economic in the extreme, and not at all like the kinds of utterances I often make here. “Greening?” is short for “Is the land greening now, in July, without the benefit of rain? How odd!”

There are few words outside. I suppose I am more meditative there – unless the branches of the lemon tree or the pomegranate tree scratch me, in which case meditative is not the word.

So “greening” rattles around in my still meditative head. Next thing I know, I am looking at everything that is green.

Here, we have green grapefruit and orange hybrids; the avocado tree looks as if three years of my “watering the roots” (via holes dug around the outer diameter line of the branches which, funnily enough, I filled in the other day) are indeed bearing fruit which will make it to full maturity, and the clementines are the size of ping-pong balls. What comes out of my mouth is “all green”.  Except for the beans. They have dried up, pods have split open, and each one has tossed the beans over an area about as big as my hand, and they are self-seeding. I shall leave them to their own devices out of pure curiosity. Well almost: I intend to poke some of the beans under the soil with my finger.

I can and I do describe these things at length, but only when I come inside. This much I can say: there is weeding to be done. The weeds are the green things in the picture above. Now that I have removed some of them, you can probably spot the reddish beans.

©2017 Allison Wright