Morning Thanks--Milkweed

"They got a lateral root," my dad-in-law told me, explaining just what we were after. He had me out to the farm to walk beans, the kind of job, back then, only traditional farmers did anymore, before spraying. His only daughter had married a teacher who knew nothing about farming. But he could walk beans. A nine-year-old could walk beans, after all. You didn't have to have a college degree to walk beans. I told him that if he'd ever have anything for me to do. . .well, you know. So he called. "Wanna' walk beans?" he said. I couldn't say no.

Those lateral roots came up when he was talking about milkweed, a bully of a plant easily distinguishable between and through much more reserved soybeans.

Dad stuck a homemade machete in my hand, a hideous thing that would have made a great weapon in some cheap murder mystery. It was hot, I remember, July hot in northwest Iowa, and the forty acres out there before us had never seen a tree. Still, for me, a teacher on summer break, being out there with him was a joy--hard work?--yup. But a joy.

Milkweed wasn't the only enemy. Waterweed, a gangly beast, shot up and out like a green skyrocket but still did a better job of mingling into bean rows. Dogbane also got whacked, even though, Dad told me, its lateral root--like its cousin milkweed--meant any bean-walking farmer could be playing whack-a-mol all summer long. But the number one criminal in the bean field was milkweed, which could grow to preposterous heights but never particularly difficult to pull or whack, largely because its life stayed down there only to return, time and time again, like something Hitchcockian.

Fifty years have gone by. Forty years ago, we used to see elaborate carriages mounted on John Deere tractors, those carriage seats filled with farm kids armed with chemical sprayers. They're gone too. Last year, the field behind our house got strafed by a yellow plane delicately laying some chemical over everything. 

Yesterday, years later, I spent a couple hours in the summer heat pulling milkweed again. When we bought a lot out here north of town, it wasn't your standard fare. We got an acre, which doesn't sound like much, but when you try to keep the weeds under some measure of control, you soon discover an acre ain't no postage stamp. 

The first year we lived out here, like an idiot, I dug up milkweed from along the road that goes past our place. I wanted milkweed for what I thought I was creating out back on that acre of Schaap land. I didn't tell my father-in-law I tried to plant some. But I'd heard, hard as it is to believe, that some naturalists in Minnesota were aying people for milkweed seeds because wholesale spraying had pulled numbers down mercilessly which threatened the fragile lives of monarch butterflies, once abundant, but no more so. I wanted milkweed--for the monarchs.

I got 'em, tons of 'em. Dad-in-law wasn't wrong. They keep coming back like idiot boxers. You can pull 'em or whack 'em. Just don't believe yo
u're rid of 'em.

And then there's this. I'm not old enough to have participated, but I've heard stories from northwest Iowa all the way to Michigan of kids, children, picking milkweed pods, putting them into whatever would hold the harvest, and then bringing them in to some designated place in town where they'd be collected.

"Two bags save one life," people said, because milkweed floss is water-repellant and naturally buoyant enough to be used for life-jackets--"two 20-pound bags of milkweed ponds for every life-preserver." 

I pulled out a wagon full yesterday, but the whole time I kept seeing little kids with big bags-full singing patriotic songs, maybe Sunday school ditties, as they filled those bags and saved the lives of men they knew from just down the street, uniformed men far, far away, on their way to Berlin. 

If you stop in the Alton dump sometime today and see a big pile of milkweed sitting there waiting to bull-dozed into the hill of grass clippings, they're mine. . .or were. They lost their lives because there simply is too many of them, far too many, which only means more in the future. I pulled dozens and dozens, but, trust me, the monarchs still have plenty out there. They'll not starve if they flutter down on our acre. I've got more, much more, I'm sure, than the corn field next door. I made sure not to pick them all. I saw one out there yesterday too--real prairie royalty.

But I want you to know that the wholesale murder I perpetuated yesterday--killing which will likely continue today--was not done un-feelingly. Milkweed is precious. There just too much of it.

I'm not lying. Thus, this morning's thanks is for the stories that played in my head yesterday afternoon, stories of milkweed.