She closes her eyes and sees a tangle of stems, snaking over trunk and limbs, hooks embedded in skin. So many they clasp each other, an army large enough to wound itself.
This again. She thought it had been dealt with long ago. So much of her adult life she has spent labouring here, scraping and painting and skirting stems. Kneeling in mattresses of leaf litter to roll coils of them, tracing through tangles to what she hoped were the main root mass; severing vascular bundles and dabbing them swiftly with poison.
Over the seasons many species have emerged. Pimple-stemmed, purple trumpet-flowered explosions that smother the very thought of other life with their zeal. Rebellious tough-barked types, with their immovable woody stems. The sneaky three-clawed fingers that catch in her thoughts, curtaining both standing and the fallen with their endless repeating refrains. The secretive arrow-leaved stems skilled in misdirection, sending her chasing line after line through roots and rocks, tunneling through metres of topsoil only to have them snap off just as she got close to the bulbous cache, buried too deep inside sandstone niches to excavate. And always, the worst for her: Those ubiquitous, water-heavy, heart-shaped leaves. They perch on succulent ropes that dangle through the canopy, raining tears of aerial tubers at seemingly the slightest disturbances. The never-ending, painful process of fishing out the plump subterranean tuber crowns while they disintegrate under her tools; knowing that even one small knobble can birth another giant if she turns her back for too long.
She should know better now than to assume eradication will result from her efforts. All she can hope to do, with the limited time and energy she has at her disposal, is to control the spread. It’s been so long now, and so persistently do they return that a part of her concedes that the space is becoming theirs. And who is she to interfere with their expansion, anyway? Isn’t this just what they do? Aren’t they simply being successful?
All that keeps her returning to this work is duty. A habitual responsibility, the need to be doing what is right, drumming in her background like a heartbeat. And perhaps, something that might approximate love. In the short time she lives here, this is her patch to tend, to defend and to increase in diversity; because it is not hers alone. Others live here and some of them are depending on her.
She sighs. Where to even start? The light is fading and today all she has is a pair of secateurs. She walks over to the nearest vine-covered hulk and starts cutting stems, ripping off a clear section from around its entire trunk . She unearths a strangled seedling at her feet, and stoops to clear the encroaching stems from around its base.
Protect what is left of the canopy. Save the parts that can still grow.
Metanoia 