The Spring anti-update

Realty sets in as I watch the following plants proliferate at an alarming pace: dandelions, violets, and defiant lamium (which took over an entire area prepped for a new flower border and now will not leave).

I feel noble and virtuous with my resistance to chemicals in the yard. I fertilize with organic turkey droppings – how cool is that –and I pull out (no exaggeration here) hundreds of dandelions by hand, one by one, so that they don’t completely control the yard. But lamium has stumped me. Thus I get a deep thrill when I come across a container of Round Up weed killer at Menard’s. I study the toxic ingredients with something verging on lust and I tell myself that there'll be one more year of waging war against the lamium and after that I’ll cave in: late at night, when no one is watching, I’ll point and spray and watch the noxious foam do its dirty work, seeping into the leaves of each and every one of these little bastards.

As for the violets: never has something that looks so pretty in June turned into such a menace for all the months after. I'll cut off the flowers and throw them in salads and basically resign myself to their spreading habit. Taste and beauty sometimes win over orderliness.