My grandmother mastered horticulture. She single handedly maintained a two acre plot of land in north Louisiana well into her nineties. Around an eighth of her back yard, hidden behind tall pine trees, boasted a beautiful garden with the southern staples of sweet corn, squash, bell peppers, okra, tomatoes, potatoes, peas, and carrots. She would venture to the weird every now and then and come out with a cushaw, zucchini, or eggplant, but these were usually not well received by the family. Her rose garden rivaled her vegetable garden. Located on the visible side of the pines, these beauties graced the church every Sunday and won many flower show awards. She participated in recycling before we ever called it recycling, purchasing approximately one box of aluminum foil and one box of plastic baggies in her lifetime. She also composted and called it chicken feed. I promise I didn’t eat a grocery store egg until I was nineteen years old and only then because she tired of sitting out all night with a shotgun keeping the coyotes at bay. I believe she was 87 at the time. So when I place my hands in dirt and feel the earth under my nails and coax life from where there once was none, I connect to a generational calling, a family tradition to understand the sweat of the brow.
Today felt like such a day with only 75 degrees and the soft breeze and the cloudless sky, promises October occasionally brings to Louisiana. My sweet olive, placed carefully by my front door to greet guests with her olfactory aptitude, suffered this summer with the heat and two hurricanes. She needed attention. I’ve picked and poked at the dollar weed trying to overtake my front flower bed, but the pesky mess is such a nuisance, I haven’t put in the appropriate effort to rid the bed of this quickly spreading bad investment that pays no dividends. Today needed to be the day to cash in the dollar weed before nothing welcomes Halloween arrivals but this bad trick - if I have any Halloween arrivals.
If you’ve ever attempted to extricate dollar weed from your yard or flower beds, you understand when I describe it as pulling wet spaghetti. You think you have good traction on one of those noodles, then the little sucker snaps, and you end up with sauce all over your white blouse. Or in my case, dirt in the eye. The more I pulled, the more I realized this problem went deep. The superficial spaghetti noodles I’d been pulling and snapping all summer ran just under the pine straw, but something sinister lurked a little further under the dirt, and the time for my spade and some digging. breezed in.
Long story short, the root system of the dollar weed was choking my poor sweet olive, and I had no idea. The more I dug, the more I pulled, the thicker and nastier those spaghetti noodles entwined and wrapped all around the base of my precious shrub. What popped out of the ground as no more than a quarter size miniature lily pad, proliferated beneath like a major city’s interstate highway system built for millions of vehicles and my poor little sweet olive, the discarded hub cap forgotten by the side of the road. And the worst part of the whole nasty mess? The rhizome - the original root of it all... I unearthed the thing from the center of a piece of mulch.
Wait a minute...this couldn’t be right? Surely my assessment of the origin of my dollar weed problem was not correct. The mulch I brought in to make my flowers grow and thrive and prosper could not be choking them. So I continued to dig like a mad woman and every single rhizome I unearthed sprouted from a piece of mulch. I had done this. I brought this foreign invader into my own garden on the back of something good. My beautiful sweet olive in the heat of summer struggled to survive with her roots choking and gurgling and searching for air, pressing back against the invader who pledged to do no harm - who arrived under the auspices of benevolence. Exhausted, back screaming at me, I lay down my spade and ask God for the lesson here.
I contemplate how I allow the invader into my own life when I bring in a good investment which over time becomes a bad investment. How often in life do distractions, even if they are positive things, wrap their tendrils around me, and when I try to shake them off, they snap like a literal wet noodle? I understand a little better now why my grandmother always insisted on attempting what we deemed weird - the cushaw, zucchini, or eggplant. They had nothing to do with us at all. They were a part of her love language with the Lord - the fruit of the earth from the sweat of her brow. She understood, really understood, how to appropriately invest. (On a side note, she kept the finances at her church for over 60 years) She put into practice Jesus’s words on investing.
“Don’t store up for yourselves treasures on earth where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal. But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroys and where thieves don’t break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also. ..No one can serve two masters, since either he will hate one and love the other or he will be devoted to one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and money.” Matthew 6:19-21, 24 CSB
My grandmother definitely invested in her relationship with God. He was her treasure, and she served others tirelessly all the years of her life. I miss her so. I feel close to her with my hands in the earth, inhaling my sweet olive, taking a good clean focused breath. I need a reminder of where my treasure lies - where I am investing - because even fertile mulch can bring in the dollar weed that chokes. My first love must always be to invest in the Lord. Everything else is just dollar weed.
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