Weeds

For Ronnie, lawn maintenance was nearly a religion. He mowed, edged, watered, fertilized and weeded. I can remember him talking about needing to tend the yard like one would speak of nurturing a child. He labored over it in the warm months and planned for it in the cold ones.

So when the weeds began encroaching on the front lawn after he died, it became almost an assault on his memory. Anna's mentioned the weeds frequently to me; they seemed to be feeding on her grief, popping up across the lawn and in the straw beds stretching around the yard's perimeter.

On Saturday morning, she and I decided to tackle the front yard. She sat near the sidewalk and I sat near the road, and we each methodically plucked weeds from between the blades of sod. The sun moved higher; we scooted a path back and forth across the lawn, leaving a trail of weeds atop the grass behind us.

And as we broke apart the fragile roots of those tiny but persistent weeds, we uprooted the thin barrier between casual words and those that reached deeper down.

"Does it seem like a long time," I asked. "Or like it was just yesterday?"

She sighed. "It depends. But most days, I just think about how long it's been and I wonder how I made it this far."

"I really missed him this week," I said. I hesitated to say this...did she want to hear how I missed him? A feeling that undoubtedly paled in comparison to her own sense of loss. She was silent.

"And...and when I think of him-" I pushed on - "I think of him chuckling. I can still hear him chuckling." My voice was quavering at this point and tears were sliding down my flushed cheeks.

"Me, too." I could tell she was crying, too. "You would never expect his laugh to sound like that."

"No," I laughed - a watery, thick kind of sound.

And it went on like that. She would tell me something she missed, and I would respond, and vice versa. Sometimes we laughed; sometimes we cried more. Our muscles were aching. The sun grew hotter, burning my shoulders and her forearms. And we kept on pulling, weed by weed, discarding those unwanted plants in heaps of green tops and spindly brown roots systems.

They seemed to cover everything when we started. But by the end of the afternoon, the lawn was a clean stretch of green sod, pristine and trimmed. Just like Ronnie would've wanted it.

The Good, The Bad & The Ugly

The Good
*David Gray is likely to have a new album out before the end of the year and he claims it is more like his early work. I am breathless with anticipation.

* Summer hours start at work next week. Hello, 9-to-4 on Fridays!

* Counting Crows are kicking off the Summer in the Park series on Good Morning America on Friday.

* Braves game on Thursday - my first trip to The Ted in almost a decade!

* Getting more and more certain that Dillon's going to be left-handed.

The Bad
* May be in love with a country musician.

* Missed House season finale last night because I am programmed for it to be on Tuesday but, as if the writers' strike wasn't enough, they moved House after it returned. Egads.

* Must work on Friday night. Blech.

* ABC canceled Women's Murder Club. Booooooo!

The Ugly
* My lower back just north of where the good Lord split me, sunburned to the nth degree after weekend yard work. Guess there was a gap between my tank and my shorts.

* My room, scattered with clothes worn over the past three weeks and littered with half-unpacked bags.

* My brain...not a great string of days here in the last 8 to 10

* Envy...the Rockstar heads to Ireland and Spain tomorrow.

* I'm grumpy as hell.