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.”