Spirea
I didn't start out hating Spirea.
I had no feeling, one way or another about them. In fact, if you'd said, "Spirea" to me the only context I could hope to put that word into is Spinoza. Maybe.
So when I was asked to dig up the 15 spirea bushes around the yard, I didn't feel much of anything. "Gotta get a shovel," was the main thing I was thinking.
So I did. I went down to Home Depot and got a shovel. This was in early June. A few days after buying the shovel, I found my mother-in-law standing in the yard, over one of the spirea bushes, shovel in hand, as well as a pitchfork with the handle missing. I took this as a none too subtle hint that my strategy of buying the shovel and expecting the threat of the shovel to be enough to either 1) get rid of the spirea or 2) placate my wife's desire to get rid of the spirea by showing a spirea-digging-like intention was not working.
I don't know if you've ever seen a spirea before. Let's indulge me and assume you haven't. So it's this bush that grows relatively low to the ground, with mostly uninteresting leaves, flowers that have completely failed to make an impression on me, because I can't seem to recall what they look like at the moment. If the ground were able to have an afro, this is what it would look like. Or maybe that's just our particular spirea. They were wild, rambunctious, and disobedient little buggers.
So I took the shovel from her and went to work, digging around this mass of unruly brush, feeling like a barber, lost in a thicket of hair, searching for the head underneath. Only in this case I was looking to behead the head on which the mop of hair sat, so I probably wouldn't last long, as a barber.
The previous owners had laid a lovely landscape down, complete with mulch, creeping vines, tulips, black-eyed susans, roses, lots and lots of bushes, trees, and even a little patch of grass or two. The mulch seemed to be a minor inconvenience for the shovel, so after hacking half-heartedly at the ground somewhere underneath the bush, I took up the pitchfork.
The pitchfork, of course, got through the mulch much better. And I wiggled it around like floss around a tooth. Just, well, no, forget that. I was going to have you imagine using the floss like I was using the pitchfork on the roots of the spirea bush. Forget about that. At any rate, I dug in, twisted, pushed, pulled, levered, shook, kicked, and leapt upon the pitchfork. The worms and other assorted bugs living in the mulch and dirt weren't excited about this, particularly, and made for the spirea bush neighbor of the one on which I was working. And then I went back to the shovel, which made some headway, wedged in the troughs left by the gyrations of the pitchfork. With each kick on the top of the blade I could feel hundreds of little roots splitting asunder somewhere in the ground. Unfortunately, I also felt the really large roots kicking back against the blade of the shovel, sending my foot every third kick into the side of the shaft of the shovel.
To solve this problem, which I took to be a problem of balance, I started leaping at the top of the shovel blade with both feet coming down squarely, the intent to drive the shovel deep and evenly into the ground, getting through the roots and to the root of the problem at hand, which in this case was precisely not roots. Or at least the state of there being no roots left to hold the bush down in the ground.
This would have been an excellent idea, had I been a three hundred pound behemoth of a man. I have no idea how I'd be able to jump high enough to land on the shovel, if I did weigh three hundred pounds. But that wasn't an issue, as I weigh a couple really large bags of feathers south of two hundred pounds, at the moment. So the end result of me leaping on the shovel wound up making me feel (and look, I'm sure) like someone playing with an arthritic
pogo-stick that should have been put out to pasture with the other old pogo-sticks but was valiantly and ineffectively trying to hang on to those past glories of bouncing like a true champion.
After a few promising cracks and about an hour or so of spinning myself around every side of the bush possible, nudging it with the shovel, I put the the tools down and threw myself on the twigs of the spirea bush and started tugging. You'd think a wiry, prolifically branched bush like the spirea would be an easy thing to get a good grip on. But you'd be surprised, if you were thinking that. But I wouldn't blame you for it. If someone had shown me a picture of a spirea and asked, "Quick! Do you think you could get a good grip on this shrub-like thing, yes or no?" I would have definitely said yes.
And I must have kept slipping on fleeing worms and beetles or something, because this ravaged shrub would just. Not. Let. Go. of that ground.
In the end, my mother-in-law grabbed the pitchfork and stabbed at the roots while I tried to hold it up and best I could. Hopefully no one young and impressionable was watching in a neighboring house, because I'm sure it was only through the intervention of whichever saint is the patron saint of not having your foot lopped off by your mother-in-law with a pitchfork was watching down on me that afternoon.
In addition to not cutting off any of my body parts, the pitchforking didn't have the desired effect on the spirea. So I returned to the shovel, slamming it into the ground underneath the spirea, making miniscule progress (I hoped) as I slammed the shovel with my body, arms, feet, whatever I could throw at it. I began to have thoughts of the old saying about insanity being the case of doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
Well, sometime well after the point I stopped thinking along those lines to avoid getting into uncomfortable psychological territory, the bush broke free from the earth, and slumped over sideways in the pit I'd been working.
Shirt muddy, sweat pouring off me in the June heat, I glanced over at the next one.
Continued, for your pleasure, next week.
disclaimer:
The head editor's arms are fine, thanks for asking, but his back was nearly out, along with his legs and arms, after an incident with a spirea bush this weekend.
Which is a surprising coincidence, given the subject of this week's issue.
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