Invasive

Rosa Multiflora ! -- a greybeard cyclist, stopped a few yards down the bike path, was hailing me.

It's an invasive species, you know ! It's all over my yard !

I straightened up. Yes, I said, I know it's invasive. But it's beautiful. 

Now it is, he replied darkly.

And it will also be beautiful when it is a spray of red berries, and even when it withers gray and dies --

But I held my tongue.  There is no convincing the cultivator of the charms of the wild. I take pictures of weeds; I do not judge. In the plant world, I am uber-inclusive.

He continued his screed. Bittersweet ! he lamented, shaking his head.

I mounted a feeble defense of the red and orange fruit,

a weed apologetics, as it were,

doomed to crumble in face of the scientific and utilitarian claims of the gardener.

In his eyes, I was a lost cause -- worse, a lunatic. Dangerous. He rejoined his pack of noisy cyclists and left me to my louche company.

It's a problem, I know.  Every year swallowwort attempts to overrun our yard. And yet I am a sucker for its little galaxies of fuzzy brown stars, even when framed by the bull goose looney of invasives, the red and green speckled Japanese knotweed.

And even I grumble at the hamfisted landscaping done by the DCR -- who managed to remove a whole lovely stand of bayberry and a swath of buttonbush, to make room for, guess what -- knotweed.

The same DCR that, once again, has mowed the pathside field down to crewcut frisbee lawn rather than let a meadow grow and thrive.

There is some moral here. Right ? Some big metaphysical insight ? I doubt it. I am short-tempered with the metaphysical world, lately. I've been reading Nordic police procedurals and trying to avoid the backward pull of mother and/or father church -- no place (I have concluded) for old (wo)men, and certainly no place for the dedicated hermit for whom joining clubs and participating in events is absolute anathema. Who was that altar-guilding, choir singing, liturgy-loving, eucharist-distributing, eternally and unsuccessfully Jesus-parsing woman ?

And who is this meadow haunting, weed-loving singleton ?