The things you find

So far, in the briar patch:

- a softball, a plastic baseball (broken), a multicoloured tennis ball, a kiddies basketball
- a sort of frisbee thing
- six or seven beer bottles
- several beer cans, an iced tea can
- a small whiskey bottle (empty)
- a large whiskey bottle (full of stagnant water)
- a broken glass vase
- three yogurt pots
- several plastic bags.

This morning, right under the poison ivy, I thought I found a nice big white moss-covered rock. I poked it with a stick to be sure. It was sickeningly soft. Looking closer, I saw it was made of a woven fabric.

Pushing away nightmares of body parts in sacks and abandoned animals, I ignored it for a few hours. Cleared some more dry reeds around it.

It was an old, rotten, sofa cushion. (The fabric was disintegrating, but the synthetic stuffing was like new. The condition of the plastics I'm digging up makes me want to scream at our pollution of the planet, but I still use plastic garbage bags and buy detergent in plastic bottles).

I peeled the cushion away from the earth, and beneath it, pink and pointed and naked, were two huge reed baby shoots, looking for the sky. Like asparagus in spring. Like bamboo in Japan.