On the first truly warm day of spring in this part of the continent, I went out weeding my garden.
I don’t enjoy weeding. I consider weeds about as lovable as Republicans. Or fundamentalist preachers. Or pre-recorded telemarketing messages.
Sorry about that—weeds tend to get my dander up about all kinds of things that bug me.
Like China. What is it about China that weed roots find so attractive?
I have a sure way of telling which green things are desirable plants, and which are weeds. If I gave it a good sharp tug, and it comes out easily, it was a plant. Past tense.
Real weeds never come out that easily.
Last summer, I bought a wonderful new weeding tool. It has prongs that jab down into the earth to grab an entire dandelion by the throat. It has a long handle that provides lots of leverage.
There’s enormous satisfaction in heaving on that handle and feeling a dandelion’s tap root scream in protest as it lets go of its links to the evil socialist empire on the far side of the world.
I blame weeds on Adam and Eve.
Weeds, you see, are a direct consequence of what theologians call “the fall.” Like tornadoes, blizzards and volcanos, noxious weeds didn’t exist in the original Garden of Eden. Read the Bible and see for yourself—there’s no mention of any of those in the Creation story of Genesis.
These complications came into being only after Adam and Eve got banished from the garden for disobeying God’s explicit command. God told them: “Don’t bite that apple!” But they did, and immediately realized they were naked.
Which, naturally enough, led to Eve getting pregnant.
So God evicted them from their Earthy paradise to a land of privatized health care, so that Eve could have babies and Adam could pay for them by the sweat of his brow.
Of course, there had to be labour for Adam to sweat over. So, since agriculture was the only industry available, God invented weeds.
Also tornadoes, earthquakes and floods, just to make sure Adam and Eve could never think they had created their own version of paradise.
As a conservative Christian once explained to me, when Adam and Eve fell from grace, the whole of Creation fell with them. That’s why I’m confident that weeds were not part of God’s original plan for this world.
Apple trees would not need pruning. Dorothy would never have been blown into the Land of Oz and a merciful God would not have had to invent RoundUp.
I haven’t figured out yet how mosquitoes fit into God’s divine design but I’m sure they’re also connected to the fall somehow. Along with climate change and stock indexes.
At least God gave us someone to blame for everything that goes wrong. We don’t have to worry that we might have contributed, by our own actions, to any of the calamities that afflict us.
Jim Taylor is an
Okanagan Centre author.
rewrite@shaw.ca.