I told her I’d spent the day weeding. She was annoyed.

“Weeding is pointless,” she said. ”They just come back. Or a fire comes through and burns everything. And then who comes back first? Weeds.”

“Well,” I tried, “I—“

“And there aren’t even really anything such as weeds,” she decreed. “A weed is just a plant somebody doesn’t want. You don’t even know what a weed is.”

“I know what is a weed,” I said. ”It’s whoever is trying to choke out the true violets, or the little trees.”

“You and your trees!” She’d never liked the thing about the trees. “Letting grow any tree who happens to come up from seed. So that now you can’t even use a lawnmower, or a weedeater: you have to crawl along, weeding by hand, so you don’t whack some tree that can barely be seen. Which is nuts. And since you’re a male, meaning controlled by sloth, and now also depressed as hell, that means half the time your place looks, like even you’ve said, like a Boo Radley house, so wild are the weeds, because you never get to them.”

“I’m making progress.” Which I am. Sort of.

“Also,” she pressed on, “you know you’ll be dead, before any of these trees of yours, ever get anywhere near big.”

“I don’t know. That plum by the kitchen porch, it’s really shooting up now.”

“You don’t even like plums!”

“I like the tree, though,” I said. “And the squirrels, and the deer, and the jays: they like the plums.”

“What you like, are the pines and the firs. And that fir, the one you call ‘the big one,’ it’s been growing, what, nearly four years now, and it’s not even six inches tall.”

“It’s really hard," I said. "Getting to be a big tree.”

“And it’s not your problem,” she insisted. “The trees can take care of themselves. They have since before there were any people. Meanwhile, you’re a mess. And the lube guy, he told you right after you moved in, he wants to buy that property, and then raze all the houses, and all the trees, and put a septic service in there.”

“Art knows this. He says that won’t happen. He won’t sell.”

“Art’s not immortal. Any more than you are. You’re a renter! It’s crazed! To nurse along all these barely visible trees, who you’ll be dead, and they’ll all be gone beneath a septic service, before they can even be recognized as trees.”

“Look, I—“

“Remember that oak last year, the one out by the road begonias, that you fussed and fussed over, nearly worshipped the one-inch thing, and then that day the deer came by, and ate it to death? You were so crushed, I thought I’d have to take you to an infirmary. And that was before the fire. Which burned off the last of your good sense. And all your good cheer.”

“There are bigger oaks this year. In more protected places. And I’m going to wrap wire around them.”

“Then you will have ugly. An eccentric ugly Boo Radley spread, dotted with ugly wire cages.”

She was right about the ugly. Why I had balked this long. At the wire cages.

“You can’t grow back all the trees that burned in the fire,” she said. "You just can't.”

“I started this years before the fire,” I said. “I just want these trees to have more of a chance.”

“I think you should give up this tree futility,” she pronounced, “and concentrate on drink. With drink, you can weed your mind.”

“But the weeds come back,” I countered.” And meanwhile, you’ve done something stupid, in the drink.”

“You don’t need drink,” she said, “to be stupid. You’re stupid, sober.”

Once upon a time, my then-partner, her parents, had moved into advanced age. They were still physically ambulatory, mentally agile, but certain things, were now, and forever after, beyond their powers.

Like, cooking. Neither of them, any longer, were able to prepare a decent meal. When they’d retired, they’d become modest world travelers. Went here, went there. Enjoyed themselves. Immensely. That, too, was over, now. So, each weekend, I set about cooking for them, a week’s worth of food, drawn from the lands, that they had visited, but never would, again. I liked doing this. Because, for most of my life, I’ve felt like, I’ve never, really, done anything, for anybody. And the food, it was appreciated. And there, among the foods offered, there became favorites. I got, increasingly, into it.

Then, the age, it advanced some more. And her father, the cancer he had so long fought off—to this day he is in the literature, as the man who longest survived this particular form of voracious aggressive rat fucking bastard skin cancer—came to take him away. It spread to his stomach. There was a drastic procedure, proposed to this 90-year-old something man, that would leave him with but a fraction of a stomach. And he was all aggressively for it; he was a fighter; he did not want to give up life; no living being does; it is why soldiers, shot and dying in the field, near universally call out for their mothers, giver of life; had a cat once, feline AIDS, fought and fought, one night, she in severe distress, we go to drive her to the vet, and, at the head of the Cherokee road, knowing death had arrived for her, she gave out the most piercing despairing wail; knew she had to leave now, the life; desperately didn’t want to; I can hear it now: hear it always: hear it in my head; and I worked like twelve bastards, on the doctors, to try to get at least one of them, to come clean: would the stomach surgery, even do any good?; and, finally, the coldest doctor, he said: no, the cancer has metastasized, it’s in a hundred places in his body, the stomach is all we can see right now, but all the cancer, is there, in all his all, the surgery, it is pointless, because he’s over, he’s finished, cancer is all that he is; and he hung on long enough—he was native Hawaiian—for his people to come out and gather, one last time, around him, and, within 24 hours of that, he was dead; and I was with him, the night that he died; we were doing home hospice; and he was restless, uncomfortable; because he was half here, half not here; death was waiting to take him; and he didn’t want to go; and at one point he looked at me, except he wasn’t really seeing me, he was mostly seeing over there; and he said ”why is here?”; and that’s a good question, the supreme and only question, and one I cannot answer, and neither can anyone else.

And then, not too long after, his wife, she went, for her final year or two, into a home. And then, she, too, was dead.

And I thought: all that food, that I made for them, over all those years: what was the point? None at all. It was pointless. They just died anyway. What a lot, of wasted wankery.

And then I thought: No. Wrong. It was appreciated, at the time. It was Right, at the time. It fulfilled, at the time.

And that’s all, we can do. All of us. All of us, are going, in the end, to the boneyard. Animal, mineral, vegetable. But, in the meantime. You do, what you can. That. Is the whole. Of the law.

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MwisdkhGQXM]