Restoration

My restoration project

Here's the way I had it figured. Taking a piece of Iowa farmland--no matter how small--and restoring it to what it once was seemed so noble, so virtuous, so benevolent, that I simply assumed Mother Nature, which is to say, the Creator of Heaven and Earth, would come around like a hired man--or woman. I expected the job would require some sweat and toil; but once the place out back would be renewed, what we'd have would be something akin to a museum. The luscious plants would keep themselves. After all, I was doing redemption, returning the ground to what it gloriously once was.

I was told different. People who'd done prairie restoration made clear that what I was up to would take some hard work. 

I listened, but I didn't hear. Know how that goes? I was renewing prairie after all, even if it was only a quarter acre. 

Wasn't that I thought I'd deserved it either, as if my good works out back should earn me some cooperation from eternal powers. I'm too much a Calvinist for that kind of cheap grace. I just expected that, once the old form returned, I'd get up in the morning, look out the window, and enjoy my own chunk of native beauty. 

For millions of years, no one had tended the garden. Nature had, on its own, produced a bountiful prairie. If I'd just tease it back to something akin to what it once was, I'd have, out back, redemption.

It's time for marestail season right now, a thin and elegant pig of a weed that will, on its own and quickly, tower over most everything out back that's actually desirable. If there weren't thousands of them, I just might like them. They're not ugly, but they grow in the kind of abundance I'd like to see in black-eyed susans or coneflowers. Marestails will joyfully take over if you let them. This time of year, turn your back for minute and six-footers banded together in warrior societies will show up wherever you look.

It's been thistles--Russian hoards. I've been picking 'em since I burned the whole restoration project down, trying to stay ahead of thousands of them, only making 'em stronger it seems. 

Who knows what it'll be next week? "I don't know if I could do it without a tractor," a neighbor told me when I asked him about restoring prairie out back of our house. He shook his head like a man who'd been accosted. "It's hard work."

Five years later, what I listened to, I'm now hearing. 

It's the story of the garden, the original. Bring land back or move it forward, some place it's never been, but the story's the same: in the heat of the day, by the sweat of the brow.

Yesterday Honeycrisps were up to $3 a pound, so I'm chewing on a Fuji this morning--much cheaper and, if you're lucky, just as sweet. This Fuji is good. I'm liking it. But what on earth must that apple have looked like anyway, that gorgeous one Eve couldn't live without, the one she and her naked sidekick chose to devour despite heavenly warnings. Must have been something--the one that bore mare'stail, waterhemp, dogweed, ragweed, cocklebur, lambsquarters, leafy spurge, and whatever else won't let my restoration alone.  

Must have been some apple.