What to Do When Your Garden is Overgrown

Have you ever seen kudzu?

I guess what I'm really asking is, have you seen what it's capable of?

It grows like wildfire back home. Climbing over the landscape of the deep South, feeding on the wet heat. It likes it even better than the home it was taken from.

We drive through the mid-afternoon. The leather interior is cracked and the asphalt before us swims in the heat. As I stare through the window I can see that it's covered all of the power lines. Growing in green sheets over the trees, stealing their light and turning them into massive Eldritch monsters. As I watch them roll by I imagine them coming to life. They would amble about, slow and careful. They'd be massive, capable of crushing us. But I would not be afraid of them.

My great grandmother used to have this car parked in a clearing behind her house. I say clearing, I assume it must have been at one point. By the time I came along, the woods had crept in closer and swallowed the car entirely. The windows, left partially unrolled, were tinted by a layer of moss. Kudzu vines grew inside, leaves choking through the engine block and creeping out from under the hood.

When I was younger, the same great grandmother once told me she buried one of her ex husbands (she had many) in the backyard. She was probably joking, but I remember thinking at the time, "Well, she let it take a whole car".

That's just how it is though. It'll take anything you leave out long enough. Everyone back home knows this about it. Bikes, cars, people. Your childhood. Anything short of napalm won't stop it and maybe not even then, depending on who you ask.

Its not that it's malicious. Its only that it wants to live. To grow and spread. And it wants it more than anything you've ever wanted. If you give it half a chance, it'll grow right through your rib cage. What I'm saying is, it would hollow you out to get an inch closer to the sun. Imagine that kind of dedication.

It's not malicious though. It's just that it wants it more than you do. Is it malicious? To want something that much? I wish I had learned how to want something that much.

Please understand that this isn't a justification. It isnt my place to judge. It's a warning. You have to ask yourself, how badly do you want it? How much would you let it take?

I don't have the answers, but I still think about that car sometimes. I wonder if it's still there, lost in the woods. Tires melted into the ground, cherry red paint chipped off into nothing. Glass and chrome all long since given over to moss.

Anyway, weed killer is on aisle 12. Half-off through the end of the week.