It is one of my household chores to keep the plants outside from dying.
Come to think of it, that is not unlike my parental chores as well.
In any case, I have been dutifully watering our garden and various flower beds along with about a half a dozen potted plants. I knew what most of them were, either plants we put out after having kept them in the house over the winter or favored perennials we routinely plant for the season.
Except for one.
It was a green leafy plant set in one of our more decorative pots, but I was not familiar with it. I finally got around to asking my wife about it this past weekend.
Me: “What is that plant outside the door, it really needs a lot of water.”
Wife: “That’s a weed. The thing I planted died and then that sprung up.”
Me: “Oh.”
A weed.
Yes, in-between mercilessly mowing down these challengers to my landscaping hegemony like a horticultural Stalin, I’ve been meticulously cultivating one that happened upon an unoccupied pot of dirt and made a home.
There are lessons to be learned in this.
First, I’m an idiot.
Second, what constitutes a “weed” can be surprisingly situational. If I found this in my garden, I’d pull it out without hesitation lest it compromise my tomato plants, much in the way you might not want some wannabe revolutionary with a masters in gender studies in a classroom setting lest he compromise your child.
The potential for damage is just too great.
But you’d be perfectly okay with him in a Starbucks making your nonfat, iced skinny mocha with light ice, because it’s a contained environment and the worst he could do is forget the chocolate drizzle.
Besides, he needs the job after his mother started making him pay rent.
As it turns out, my interloping potted plant is commonly known as a pokeweed. So, yeah, the word “weed” is right there in the name. While it is considered as such by farmers and is poisonous to mammals, songbirds can eat the berries, and some people do in fact use it as an ornamental.
Regardless, in the end my wife and I agreed that it’s a nice leafy green plant that managed to perfectly center itself in the pot.
So, it stays.
But I’m still an idiot.