Day # 225 Mores ( not smores )

Like many people, I come from the Midwest region of the United States.  While this region produces a diverse group of people, a certain percentage of which flee quickly to other parts of the country, there are certain traits that identify a Midwesterner.

When life turns to wrack and ruin, casting away all that was once a comfortable certainty, some people will turn to drink.  Not a bad option, that, unless you've already done that route and the toll booth is closed.  Other people, facing that which cannot be imagined, will turn to dope.  Again, not a bad option in the short term unless you have the same prior routing and toll booth issues as drink.

While those of Midwestern stock can and do turn to drink or dope, we also have a genetic fall back coping mechanism:  we work.  When I am out on the sidewalk in front of my building, digging weeds out of the sidewalk cracks with an intensity that compares to a Zen monk scrubbing temple floors, most of the passersby will give me a wide berth and keep walking.  A few pedestrians will offer a polite comment about a job well done.

Then there are the others, those of the same stock; those that know.  While I am head down, scraping and digging and prying out weeds and grasses which hold tenaciously to their purchase in the sidewalk, desperately clinging to life, an older person will pass me and stop.  They will catch my eye and nod with grim approval.  They have seen right through the petty desire for a clean sidewalk, swept aside the simple yen for neatness acquired through hard work.  They know.   Behind the fierce manual labor they behold an effort to eradicate, at least for the moment, a life in shambles which can only be set right by work, work and more work.  No labouring over spreadsheets or namby-pamby office drudgery will suffice.  The Midwestern ethic calls for physical labour, preferably something that requires primitive hand tools and a stooped posture.  Scything hay, shoveling manure, or, lacking a farm, pulling weeds from a hundred feet of sidewalk cracks; these are the tasks that cleanse and purge.

I meet their eyes.  There is an understanding that passes, however briefly, between us.  They walk on and I bend to the next section, intent on leaving no root behind.