Weed Picker
Photo by Maurice Engelen
On Saturday afternoons, if we weren’t at a matinee watching a double feature, Brother and I went rollerskating at Rollerama. Mom dropped us off with enough money for admission and skate rental, but anything else we wanted, we had to buy ourselves.
I was a third-grader with a two-bit allowance. But at Rollerama, my quarter bought me a Big Hunk, a Hershey bar, and two fist full of Sweet Tarts and a gum ball from the penny candy machines.
Beneath our single-wide trailer was an open crawl space, barely three feet high. Unlike some of the permanent resident trailers in Happy Acres, we didn’t have an aluminum skirt around the bottom of ours, so there were weeds to pick, especially in the spring.
I hated pulling weeds under our trailer for money. Brother wouldn’t do it and instead mowed the lawn. It was not only dark and spooky, but there were also cockroaches, pill bugs, pincher bugs, earthworms, and spiders living under it.
Black Widows were the worst, lurking between the trailer's metal floor beams. Sometimes, they'd drop to eye level, dangling from a sticky thread, their abdomens the size of gumballs. Usually, they left me alone unless I accidentally snagged their webs. They'd scurry out to see if they'd trapped a meal, only to retreat disappointed. They seemed more concerned with guarding their cotton ball egg sacs than fighting with a giant like me.
I couldn't kill a Black Widow or any living creature on purpose, not even a fly. A kid at school once told me that if you didn't squish a Black Widow just right, her red hourglass would leap out of her body and bounce around like a jumping bean until it landed inside your mouth, and then you'd die. I couldn’t take that risk.
I’d take a deep breath, push up my glasses, and crawl underneath our trailer on my belly. For half an hour, I dawdled mostly, pulling the obvious weeds that Mom could see. And sometimes, I just lay there because the ground felt cool.
“Are you finished yet?” Mom whacked the side of the trailer. I rolled over and saw her dirty white slippers.
“I’m almost done,” I yelled. The last thing I wanted was Mom on her hands and knees inspecting my handiwork. Surely, I’d be grounded.
As cockroaches scurried around me, I crawled deeper into the darkness and ripped up plants. Between the creepy crawlies and spider webs, I always felt like something was tickling my hair or wriggling under my shirt.
I stopped weeding when Mom was satisfied that my pile of dead plants was worth a quarter. Then, I’d emerge from the darkness like a squinty-eyed mole caked in dirt.
“Go get cleaned up,” Mom said. “And don’t forget to scrub your fingernails this time!”
That afternoon at Rollerama, I felt unstoppable–except for the two times I accidentally crashed into a kid while skating backward. I zoomed around the rink like a rocket, weaving in and out of all the slowpokes and couples holding hands. I danced to the Hokey-Pokey, placed second in a race against older kids, and spent all my hard-earned allowance on candy.
