behindtheax

weeds

We step across the threshold into October. Just down the hall, near the den sits winter. With a nod she invites us all to go sit with her for a while but for now we’ll just hang out near the front door's coat rack, and look back through the window at summer.

I decided to take the dogs for a walk to the quarry yesterday. As I past a coin-operated newspaper dispenser the headlines caught my attention. It collapsed like a house of cards, it read. It was referring to the Quebec Overpass, near Montreal, which fell on two cars, reducing them to sheet metal, killing five people.
I kept thinking about it as I walked. I wondered how busy the highway would have been on a Saturday? Were they passing under it at the regular speed or were they slowed up in traffic? How long does it take a car , which is traveling at 100 kms an hour, to pass beneath an overpass? 3 seconds? And where were they going? To the mall - to visit a friend - or heading out into the country to see the changing leaves? Or were they returning home with the baguette and quart of milk they were asked to pick up while they were out? Three seconds – I thought about how many seconds there are in an hour, a day, a year -30 million and change I figure. What are the odds of being under the pass on that very second it let go?

And then I started thinking of the surviving family members. When did they first glance at their stove top clock and say, “What’s keeping them?”

Today I thought about the worker, who was sent to the bridge a half an hour before it collapsed, to investigate a complaint about falling debris. He declared it safe. Would he have been an engineer? And does he now sit with his face in his hands, agonizingly wishing for a chance to go back and change his decision. Life is a house of cards.


When I got to the quarry yesterday, I let the dogs off their leashes and they went flying through the tall grass. I stood for a moment and looked out across the expanse of field at its mixture of colour and I wished I could describe what I was seeing, or better yet feeling. The grass was the colour of a buckskin horse – two shades lighter than gold– and all through it were tall batches of flowering weeds -white, lavender, yellow, rust, brown. There were monarchs hovering over the tops of the tall, purple wayleaf thistles and there were clusters of what looked like minuscule yellow daisies, their sheer volume causing their bodies to bend into perfect arches. There was such a wild look to everything – it made me feel that our world could go on just perfectly well without us. For a moment i felt very vulnerable in that field of such incredible, resilient flowering weeds.

posted by mary j. @ 1:15 PM