JOY ALONG THE WAY: CACOPHONY ERUPTS IN THE BACK YARD

My address now is HTT/BY:Com./VW. You can't access it on World Wide Web so I'll decipher it for you. Home Terrain Territory. Back yard.Come. Visitors Welcome. Slowly we are getting back to hieroglyphics. The next step backwards will be rebuses without the in between words.

Any time I don't answer my telephone now -- telephone? Is it going the way of the Arabic alphabet, slate and coffee grinder? I digress. Any time I don't answer my telephone, I'm outside fighting (a la Don Quixote) creeping henbit, chickweed, wild garlic (I'd say wild onions but someone corrected me once). I don't mind the fray. The martins will be talking to me nonstop, the cardinals to each other, voicing their territorial rights and the blue jays having a Crossfire conversation with the squirrels who are spiraling up and down the oaks. Neither gets to finish a sentence.

After I've uprooted the obnoxious weeds, I give them a whack and call them uncomplimentary names for things that bother me. Whack! That's for you passing me on the right on Mount Auburn Road. It is not a four-lane street. Whack! That's for you who, passing by in the night, throw beer cans and cigarette butts into my yard. Whack, for all vandals everywhere.

Whack, whack here. Whack, whack there. Whack, whack everywhere. But the biggest whack is for me for having such an explosion right there in the spring sunshine when all nature that escaped the freeze is coming alive.

So, to ease the sting of my self-inflicted whacks, I begin to make apologies. "Creeping henbit, you can't be all that bad for just look at that beautiful sea of lavender your first cousins make out there by the martin house. Look, a breeze is stirring them to lighten their colorful waters. Hey, two doves are sailing slowly through the lavender waters like little gray ships. Lavender water! That's what Mama used to rinse our face and hands with before starting to Sunday School."

A small pile of uprooted chickweed with its little white eyes closing in death stare at me accusingly. "It's all right, little chicks," I try to comfort. "You'd soon be dead in the scorching sun anyway. I'm sending you off without the burn or any other longtime suffering. It's the coming thing now. But you'll resurrect and resurrect ad infinitum."

"Wild onions, er, garlic, you stand like amusing miniature rain forests here, there, everywhere. You have some redeeming qualities. More than once I've cut off your roots and tops and squashed your little white bulbs around the bottom and sides of my wooden salad bowl. Not bad. But when you pass through the cow's stomachs and get into the milk and butter ... arraugh! But then I've no cows around here.

"I admire you all for your tenacity. It should be imitated by all who stand for order and peace and the right thing."

I arise to rake all my weedings into one pile. This action raises the decibel of the intermingling, chortling, churring, squawking. I pause to interpret. "Right thing? Right thing?" they are saying, or I'm making them say. "What's the right thing? When will everyone agree, agree, agree?" A woodpecker in a nearby tree begins to nail down the everlasting question like some invisible theses on what will be the doorway to his home.

REJOICE!

~Jean Bell Mosley is an author and longton columnist for the Southeast Missourian.