You're Just a Weed

May 21

Her tiny hands reached down and grasped at the yellow buttercups in the field. She held them up to her sister’s chin and it shown yellow below her chubby little face. “You are loved,” squealed the little girl! “Somebody surely loves you,” she teased while her sister smiled up into her eyes. A wise woman had told the little girl of the magic of buttercups and she had taken the magic into her soul and the myth had become a part of her. In the summer she loved the buttercups best but all flowers fueled her joy. Together the sisters made much childhood magic of play and imagination but above all were her beloved magical stews and potions. She always had to have the most-wild of flowers for them.

One day across a dangerous and busy road there sat a mirage of shining color and bursting blooms whispering of their potency to her. She knew it was against the rules but their magic was clearly great. The small gaggle of young girls they had amassed crossed the road together where cars were known to barrel down at impossible speeds. Breathless and rasping on their harrowed return they stirred the glorious and deliciously naughty flowers in. This magic was strong. They weren’t wrong. Dancing a May dance around the tiny pot they added a bit of this and a bit of that as they stirred.

SMACK. The hard ruler rasped across the knuckles of one of her friends as the two sisters gaped at the friend’s puritanical mother towering over the magical cauldron. “Where did you get those,” she asked? The girls at first not wanting to give up their deviousness and slightly terrified by the woman lied and she became irate for their young minds had not realized it was a rhetorical question and she already knew. “You heathens,” she hissed through her teeth and her tightly nit brow pulled tight by a severe bun creased. “You lie, and you make the magic of the devil. You may not play with my daughter again,” she had said. Her daughter looked up with tear filled eyes for she knew the magic was real. She was not allowed to celebrate on Halloween with the other kids because her mother had said that too was of the devil, sad to have to leave their friend in the hands of her tyrannical mother the girls hurried away home. The mother stayed true to her word and their daughter was lost to them.

She made new friends and she grew still loving flowers and trees. She grew loving the moon and magic. Her life was moving and she growing into the age where you first learn that most people do not believe that magic exists. One day she had collected a large gathering of wildness that was full of flowering scent. To her they were the most beautiful bouquet of flowers that she had ever seen. When she brought them home she was asked why she would bring these wild things into the house with bugs crawling on them. She was told these aren’t flowers. Those are just weeds.

They must be right. Why did nobody stop to stare at their splendid beauty or gift them to each other on holidays? She tried to believe that they were weeds. She looked at her beloved wild masses of color and she no longer picked them even though she still noticed them everywhere. She would say to them “you may be beautiful but you’re just a weed.” She drifted even further away from that country side and grew within the well-constructed walls of polite society leaving the wild blooms behind her.

She asked for flowers from her lovers. Her yen for things that bloom had never left her. She did love roses best when gifted to her with their deep erotic scent and the hint of wild they still carried in their thorns. The flowers did bring her a measure of joy. Yet, she was left yearning and unfulfilled by these store-bought and polished gift flowers. They were pretty but she was able to see a sadness around the blooms that you chose from a bucket on aisle number one. The flowers carried the sadness of society in their tiny buds. What had they gone through in their growth? Were they allowed to send their deep roots into the dirt, and were their faces allowed to turn up towards the sun? Did the soft rain fall upon their petals? She loved getting flowers but still something about these manufactured ones didn’t satisfy her. What was missing?

One day after she herself had had babes and once again could see the magic in their eyes as they touched nature she went for a walk. She ventured off of the path and saw a glorious field filled with purple majestic weeds. The scent of them filled her nostrils full and then suddenly she knew. She had a long contemplative moment with them. She spoke to the petals softly in apology “you are not a weed. You are the most beautiful and magical flowers I have ever seen. You and I are so much alike. Why do they call you a weed? Because you will not behave? Oh, purple beauty you and me both!” She laughed up into the sky and she processed some more of what she had been told. What she was told was not true. She asked herself what makes those store packaged roses a flower and these a weed? The answer came to her surprisingly quickly. They are domesticated.

Domestication. They have had their wildness stolen from them. Their thorns are broken off and they are made to look pretty from behind the glass in a case for the amusement of the civilized. They are called flower because they are made to behave. They are told how big they must be and how they must appear. They are told to be good girls. She imagined the unruly ones would be tossed aside. She spoke again to the fragrant bloom, “they say you’re just a weed, but I am a weed too. Just because we will not behave does not make us worth less than those store-kept blooms. We are still flowers too, but do not tell the others dear heart for I will not be made to behave. Do not label me flower and take my wildness away. I will never be placed behind the glass of corporatization again and neither will you. We are too beautiful and untamed for them to understand. I am as wild as the bison, as beautiful as the sea and as misbehaved as I can possibly be. Yes, please refer to me as a weed for in that name we are free.”

She had found magic once again in the wildness of the buttercup, dame’s wort and all of the others too. She vowed to herself and to the beautiful purple bloom that she would never reveal their magic to anyone unworthy and they would keep her secret too. She was as wild as a weed and she was free. Do not call her a delicate flower for her magic is strong.