As I head toward the stoplight she approaches me. Her knotted and wrinkled old hand claws me in the direction of a plastic bag on the ground. It appears to be a bag of weeds. Her clothes are old, dirty and mismatched. She doesn’t stand over five feet, especially hunched over, as she is, probably from lack of calcium and other nutrients back when Korea was a poor country. Her face wears the work of a hundred summers in the sun, wind and rain, and the wrinkles around her eyes make me want to jump deep into them to see what treasures of her long life I can find.
Her mouth speaks things I cannot understand, and what teeth she still manages to keep scare me back to a safe distance on the corner. (I always hate how these kinds of things momentarily cut through compassion and make me loathsome, despite my regret for such feelings at the time. Loath for the person in front of me, loath for the person inside of me for loathing involuntarily). But it doesn’t last long. I am pretty sure she is telling me to buy the weeds. I try to tell her I have no idea what to do with her bag of green grazings.
She has an insistence on what she has to sell. You cook it, I take it. Or you make salad maybe? Maybe it had a lot of vitamins in it? Or maybe it has ancient cancer fighting agents when made into a tea, how could I know? It hurts me that I don't want what she is selling; It seems to be of such value to her, and she has loving insistence on me having something I really don’t want. I wish that I could really want that bag of weeds. Like one wishes he could love his mother’s burnt gravy each year at thanksgiving, or the brutally ugly sweater she buys at Christmas.
These greens seemed to me, the same things which we spray in our backyard to avoid their determined spread. We rub them yellow under our chins while muttering a childish saying about our mothers and butter, and we blow them like little white angels when they become fluffy, not realizing we are perpetuating our own backyard malignancy. Isn’t that always the way.
I search my purse for a paper bill. I find a five. I hand it to her without thinking of her pride. Just take the money, I think. Take your bag of wonder, and take your money, and stop hurting me with your authentic beauty, and your pathetic existence, selling a bag of weeds in your tatters. Stop making me jealous, wanting to have the wisdom and the peace that you have, with your bag of common backyard nuisance, on your street corner. Kind insistence, persistence, or whatever it is that is pulling on my emotions so strongly, make it stop.
Of course, she will have no money without giving me the bag. I realize it is of great value, and to not take the bag would really be awful to her. I take the bag and paste on a smile, my heart still cut, and bow, heading off to wait for the next green light. She smiles, her work is done for the day, for there was only one bag of weeds.
As I cross the street, I try to recover from whatever that was, and try not to scold myself for such a irrational purchase of something I do not want. At the same time, I wish the weeds had have been more expensive. What to do with a bag of weeds. I am sure I will think of something. Part of me wants to hang on to them, because somehow they are special. Maybe just because I don’t know exactly what to do with them, it doesn’t take away from their value, I think.
Alongside me comes a woman, around the same age as me, native to this country. She has seen the entire transaction. Before we reach the other side of the street she has asked me, are you going to throw those in the trash? I shrug, of course, because I have no idea what I will do with them. I haven’t gotten that far along in my processing. It’s just a five bill and a bag of weeds (that a poor old grandmother searched out and harvested for the entire day).
Would you like them? I ask her. Are you sure, she says (not asks, just says for show, since we both know she wants them bad and I'm going to give them to her).
Now, I am laughing at myself and at the situation. Be my guest, I think. And I hand her the bag. Oh my, she blushes, I couldn’t. Well you asked for them, you nosey housewife. Anyways, have them.
After all, the only use I have for them is to give me something to write about. I wait for the bus.
