Below the surface

Preparing my garden for planting, working with a fork in the soft soil, I learn that every kind of weed has already taken up residence, has in fact rooted.

Roots: so many different kinds--long naked tap roots, string- like hairy roots, smooth horizontal roots, clumpy roots, roots spurting in every direction from the root plate, thick meaty taproots, red wet roots, white dry roots, brown and dusty roots, roots that pull out with a satisfying tearing pop, shallow roots and deep, wispy roots like netting--and these just the weeds. What about the roots burrowing in from the nearby grape vine or maple tree. Stems crawling on the ground become furry at the joints with root fuzz.  Even tiny fragments as pale as dead men's fingers sprout hopeful shoots. If the shoot is pulled off, it doesn't matter. The root survives, sends up another.

There's a world of roots just in my garden plot and I've picked it over year after year, pulling out and tossing what I could and there's still a root riot going on. (shades of Theodore Roethke's Root Cellar : 'Nothing would give up life:/Even the dirt kept breathing a small breath.') What about under the rest of the yard? The soil must be as busy as down below a Manhattan street, except that roots don't excavate hollow spaces but rather insinuate and extrude into the interstices.

I usually think of roots as the back office for the real work of stems, leaves and fruit (and by the way, my gnawed-to-the-bone pear is starting, tentatively it seems, to bud again) but what if roots are as much in the action as the part of the plant head-banging in the wind. Perhaps the fox was right in conversation with the Little Prince: what is essential is invisible to the eyes.

We talk about our roots, meaning our heritage, what makes us strong in who we are. But what if we don't just come from roots but put down roots, elbow into new situations and make ourselves at home. What if our roots are for barrier piercing (I just pulled up a weed that had grown through a buried glove) and cement buckling (they just finished replacing the sidewalk along Memorial Drive because the trees next to the river had kneed up the slabs)?

Nothing speaks to me more clearly of the (manic?) vitality of life than roots. The analogous phenomenon, in human beings might be curiosity, or perhaps mankind as a whole in the soil of realizable possibility; indeed, why only mankind?

Now the soil seems to be reasonably clean and my lettuce, peppers, tomatoes are in their rows. Order reigns--for the moment. Let the jungle-ing begin.