There goes the neighborhood

Why is it when you take a plant away from its homeland and transplant it into a new environment, it loses all restraint, takes over the place and runs everybody else out? I could understand if it was a drug ring, but plants have more sense than that.

It is like this: Once I had a dream that I traveled to the Old World. I had these images of rafts crowded with women and children, rats that resemble piles of old rags, peasants along the trails beating the rocky soil with wooden gardening tools, Stukas sweeping down from a clear blue sky, border guards with ice blue eyes asking me for my papers, which had been lifted from the nightstand in our room the previous night when the hotel staff poured nitrous oxide into the ventilation system, then celebrated the affair with a round of vodka and loud singing which actually woke me up and I thought I was in prison but I was only imagining it for a few hours, that is, until the next day when the border guard locked the door behind me and I saw that pile of rags again on the floor and the set of dentures and wondered if my identity is stolen, who would know that I am in this cell. I mean, would I?

Then I picture some guy in a grey trench coat and a hat pulled down over his eyebrows, I cant see anything but a shadow on his face, and he is handing me a ceramic figurine of a laying hen, I think it was antique salt shaker, and now the police are showing up again and this time they have my passport which disappeared that other night and they are waving it in my face and telling me, in a thick accent that sounds unlike any I have heard before, that I have to give them that salt shaker in order to recover my identity. I told them that I am no longer who I am and that I am somebody else and they look puzzled. We need a translator but none is to be found.

Fortunately, I woke up before I did anything severe, although someone had stolen my belongings while I was out.

Not everybody would hold back.

These are plants called noxious weeds. They are pestilential invaders that were often stowaways smuggled onto ships in bales of hay, clothing, and animal fur. Plants with names like Russian thistle, Spotted knapweed, Leafy spurge, Creeping Jenny, Garlic mustard, Purple loosestrife, Eurasian milfoil. The names are quaint, but the plants are loathsome, vile, pernicious, ill-mannered, boorish, and omnipresent. They will take over everything. They remind me of a neighbor I once had who collected junk. At first there was an old car, sitting peacefully in the shade of a Northern Red oak. The acorns would rattle off of the hood in the fall. Then came the camper, reclaimed from a landfill nearby or maybe a construction site in Gary, Indiana where it had been abandoned to the drifters and fugitives that haunted the old steel mills. I think one was still in the car. Maybe he crawled out and tunneled into the fellow’s basement. I couldn’t say. Then it was an old bedspring. He put cement blocks on it and towed it up and down his gravel driveway with a sputtering riding mower. Eventually I noticed a pattern, and I was able to arrange his collection into epochs. The lawn mower came onto the scene at the end of the Wheeled Age. This was the first epoch, and the most enduring; those relicts can be seen down to this day. This was followed by the Furniture Age. The bedspring appeared at that time, along with lawn chairs, umbrellas, and weathered end tables employed to hold summer drinks and eventually buried beneath items that were deposited in later periods. Then came the Ornament Age, our current age, with its wooden butterflies, ceramic squirrels, gazing balls, birdbaths. I watched as the items accumulated, steadily and relentlessly, stratified and uniform, until they tumbled over our property line and advanced toward our door.

There was an upheaval at one time – I believe that there was an argument, maybe fisticuffs - and things were overturned, and the sequence of deposition became blurred. But the age of these items can usually be sorted out by comparing them to ones found in other yards in our neighborhood which have not experienced upheaval. Those are rarities – most families have been in tumult - but with determined effort and trespass, they can be found. One such yard is being excavated by a team of archaeologists from a university in the southern US. They say they have found graves.

Anyhow, after a while I thought I should do a little digging myself, and it was not long before I realized that this fellow had a pedigree. His ancestors were Visigoths and Vandals, pillagers of fame, toothless bearded men swinging clubs and torches, charging across open fields with open mouths, burning homes, carrying away goats and swine. It was time to stop digging. Any more and it might be my own grave.

The next morning I found a wind chime on my doorstep. That afternoon we moved out.