Thanks for the milkweed

"Walking beans" was never a joy, but it was tolerable when my father-in-law would talk about farming way back when he was a kid. Truth?--I didn't mind the job. It didn't tax the intellect, which was why he trusted me doing it in the first place. In a field of soybeans, weeds are, well, obvious; all you had to do was knock 'em down, whack 'em, or take 'em out any way you can. Any fool could do that. Even a professor.

Waterweed, dogbane, and milkweed--everything had to go. Milkweed was particularly pernicious because it has a lateral root, my father-in-law said, meaning that taking one plant out was only going to invigorate another down the line, turning the action, over time, into some madcap midway game. You can kill what shows up, but some descendant just down the row is only going to come up giggling soon enough.

Ralph Waldo Emerson once said, famously, that a weed was really a plant whose virtues had never been discovered. I have no idea which weeds he had in mind with that quip--Thoreau, after all, did most of Emerson's gardening; but Waldo could have been thinking about milkweed because while milkweed was an indefatigable enemy in my father-in-law's soy beans, it can be a rare beauty in late fall, when there's not much else on a rural landscape to beg our attention.

The one up top was one of a tribe on the slope of a hill beside a bridge and above the river. Catch the light right and its feathery floss seems like angel's wings. I'd been trying to get the perfect shot at another stand, using a fir tree as a backdrop; but I knew the moment I saw this torch in the shadows that if I played my cards right, I'd get something gorgeous. Even as it stood there, it was perfectly beguiling.

I'm not old enough to have been a kid during World War II, but I had friends who gathered milkweed floss for the war effort, going hither and yon in rural areas, picking pods at exactly the right time, just before they opened.

All that milkweed fuzz went into life jackets for Allied pilots, tagged "Mae West vests" because they. . .well, guess. 

I'm not sure ten-year-olds were told the Mae West stuff, and I probably shouldn't have flashed those famous bosoms either. Then again, maybe they'll boost ratings. 

Those war-time kids got paid for their efforts too. In Illinois, they got 15 cents for every onion bag they filled, a nickel more if the pods were dry. Two bags of pods contained sufficient floss for one life jacket. Amazingly, in 1944 two million pounds of milkweed floss were gathered, enough, the Army said, to pack 1.2 million Mae West vests.

I wonder if that one up top, the one I spotted at the bridge, had a famous ancestor.

Makes me want to repent for hoeing 'em down years ago.

Anyway, sixty years after all those schoolkids took to the fields, a whole family of milkweed flirted with the wind not more than twenty feet or so from the highway 10, some in shadow, some in bright sun, and I caught 'em at it. Isn't that beauty something? This time of year they don't need Mae West. They're pinups themselves.

This Thanksgiving morning's thanks is, oddly enough, for an endless supply of milkweed, whose glory can't be bested in early November and whose wartime history will always been worth retelling. Small things really, but I can't help but think that's what Thanksgiving is all about. How did Mother Teresa say it?--"to the good God, nothing is little."

Even milkweed.

Happy thanksgiving, even if, this year, it's a small one. Be safe.