I'm Adely Melz and this is The Slowdown.

The other day I couldn't read the news any longer.

I couldn't answer any more emails or texts, and instead I threw my whole body into weeding

the flower beds and the garden.

I tugged hard at the American pokeweed, huge and looming in their wide green foliage

and a red rhubarb-like stalk and poisonous apparently to even the touch.

I yanked out the Virginia Creeper so satisfying to tug because soon the whole slinky weed came

up out of the vibrant green cypress it was trying to strangle and it felt as if I just

solved one of the world's issues.

At one point, after pruning the rose bush and doing my best to stop the winter creeper

from overtaking the boxwoods and anemones, I felt almost like a violent destroyer.

By the day's news and more alive in my body than I had been in months, I was frenzied

and covered in scrapes and the rage against the world felt good.

I pulled up the poison ivy and the stray mint that escaped its raised bed.

I cut down some honeysuckle and sawed off the trunk of three mimosa seedlings ready

to take over the fence line.

I couldn't stop.

I was wild with what it meant to control something, anything, even this little bit of land I

love and want to thrive.

Still, there is part of me that news, it is a violent act to weed and pull and yank

and kill in order to make another thing thrive, a planted thing.

Who gets to decide what is a flower and what's a weed?

...