We’ve escaped the heavy hammer of a minute hand – a feat only appreciated by him and I in this exact moment, but we do not mention it aloud. My sister views grief as stillness, as silence, as loneliness. She has not yet come to her own tragedies of life – moments that hold you hostage with the steady pick of time. My sister does not understand how we sit alone with the clock, waiting for our own hour to come. She will not commend our bravery for going outside to pull weeds.
He sits across from me, a few rose bushes over, in a worn-out factory uniform – his last name hardly legible on the front pocket. My hair blows in the wind and I can feel tiny tangles tug at my scalp. We are both exposed to the light. We both observe spring and what continues to thrive.
I will pull the clover. He will pull the green onions. We will pull everything in between. Our work is gentle, as the dirt is still pliable from the morning dew: the slightest tug will produce complete roots. We toss the expelled weeds into piles as the sun begins to wilt their fronds. Without water, they begin to die.
My clover is easily identified: long, clover filled shoots create a large circle from a well-defined center. I start at the top, grab the ends of the top shoot, spin my hand counterclockwise to gather all shoots like a ponytail, and pull at the center. Clover after clover, I gather the shoots this way.
After several minutes, I pause to consider why I do not gather the shoots clockwise, in the direction of time. I tell myself I pull the weeds counterclockwise because I am right-handed; and this process is the same as it’s been since I was a child: wiping up a spill in a counterclockwise motion – or – washing my body in the same circles – or – tracing tiny circles onto my husband’s hand as a ventilator worked until we all gave up.
As I gather the next clover, I watch my hand make the circle. I tug the center. I toss the clover into a large pile. I consider each clover a minute of time. I assume I have pulled 20 weeds. I calculate 40 more clover to produce an hour of time. I try to calculate two years and 62 days in clover time.
My father has produced a smaller pile of weeds, but green onions are more tedious than clover. He tugs at the base of the weed, but their fronds are brittle and easily detached from the root. He shakes his head in disappointment when he fails to capture the root of the weed and he chooses to extract the following weed with his index finger, running it down the side of the weed and into the soil. He pushes until he feels a swollen onion, cups his fingertip below it, and pulls. The weed is intact and he tosses it into his pile.
With each push into the earth, I wonder if he hopes to find my mother’s finger, wedding ring still attached. I wonder if he hopes to then extract her from the broken dirt and dust her off. I wonder if with each discovery of an onion bulb, he is reminded of his grief as I am of mine.
Hour after hour, we burn in the sun, our ends becoming as limp as the piles of withering weeds, but we keep working to avoid the minute hand that waits for us in the house. My sister will call this afternoon, as she does each day, a blaring ring disrupting the tick of the clock.
I imagine telling her about our hard work. I imagine her wide eyes when I explain Clover Time and how Derek is clean and sober. I tell her we are expecting our first child.
She cries.
I go on to explain our father also had a productive day and that our mother is having her evening cigarette at the kitchen table.
C. Cimmone is an author and editor from Texas. She is alive and well on Twitter at @diefunnier.