Catnip

During spring, the narrow scrap of land terraced between city street and parking lot by my building fills quickly with grasses, gilliflower, and burdock. Useful plants. Among the greenery, another herb that loves sun and poor soil comes into being for lucky us; catnip. Just like waiting for the right week to gather wild leeks, I wait to see how far I can outlast the city workers who come each year to mow this strip down to the bare ground.

Today was the day, cool and sunny, and I can just feel city fingers twitching to ride that tractor mower over the tender, inoffensive growth in order to keep the critter levels to a minimum. Lord knows, the feral colony of cats cared for by Crazy Cat Lady Numero Uno--not me, I rank an easy second--leaves gifts of mice and etcetera by car doors of humans they like. We don't have a problem with vermin thanks to them, nor do we have the numbers of wild bunnies that used to exist down here anymore. We do have skunks, a pair of woodchucks, whitefooted mice, regular mice, shrews, and plenty of grey squirrels fuzzing about this bit of sloped ground, at least until it gets mowed.

Every year, it is evident afterwards that the mower has done the job with a vengeance, for the blade of the machine bites into the earth, slicing apart the dirt holding the roots of things. It must be on purpose, for wouldn't the person working this objective stop to raise the blade after the first cut of hillock spewed out dirt and stone? The incline performs as a run off from the street at the top, and has a stone culvert added after a pipeline break flooded the lot below. Because was the canal area in early city history, when the drain busted it washed broken shards of blue pottery, red brick, odd bits of terra cotta plumbing, and a wallop of discarded clamshells from the row of bars and boarding houses that once did business and murder here. So, lots of debris gets bladed as well as the field grass.

The upper street leads to an arena used for entertainment venues and also provides affordable parking for the events. People returning to their cars often toss bottles, the large glass kind once holding alcohol, over the fence and out of their sight. These also get chewed into calamity for the shoeless.

At the base of the slope within its perimeter exist several crabapple trees, most of which are dying. The October snowstorm in 2006 deviled them, along with city workers who in possible illegality, used salt left from a milder winter as weed killer on the lot side and heaped it in dirty grey mounds less than a foot away from the trees' trunks. Poor dead branches mingle with lush blossoms on the living, the deep rose color vivid as a Bengali wedding. The falling petals cover my car; I dispense them on the highway at fifty miles per hour. I know the builders will come and eventually pull the trees out; today I am grateful for the luxury they afford me.

This is what I see when I scutter sideways along the city hill for the grey green fuzzy leaves of catmint. I clip the stalks, not too far down for the plant should be able to feed itself after I behead the thing. Sometimes, if city budgeting is shortshrifted, the mowing does not happen till later in summer, when the first growth of the plant has gone to seed and died back in August heat. This means a few more forays to top off the earlier harvest. It comes back again by September for a second turn, and will continue till the first frost. But this first part of catnip season is fresh, unbelievable that such fat leaves with scalloped edging burst upwards from the scraggly rootstock of this plant that prefers dry-ish scrapyards of ground.

Min, my oldest cat, has found the half-full bag and is as happily enchanted as a trick-or-treater with a sack of confectionary sin. She hasn't moved for three minutes, inhaling the bitter aroma from the leaves, and has only just now wriggled in, leaving her tail out as proof that the cat is in the bag. My other ones wait till she is shooed out by me, then delight in the fresh leaves I crush for them.

Navigating around the empty vodka bottle and fast food cups, this talisman plant of frail soil gives me pleasure as I know my cats will enjoy it. It tickles me to wade through knee-high grasses, and find the gill-over-the-ground, the early mustard plants, the burdock whose leaves arc close to earth, the beginning rosettes that will be later cornflowers or moth mullein. The bumblebees are dazed by crabapple blossoms, the first butterflies cling to tiny throats of purple vaselike flowers, probing for nectar as energy to lift themselves up in the fresh, clear air.

The night has come and the city lights glow, illuminating the field to a muddy brown under the orange lamplight. Car noise, tire treads on pavement, motors accelerating in the evening have taken the stage from the humming buzz of insects, the swishswash of grasses of day. The cats are sacked out on the couch and any warm electrical technology they can fit on. I am thinking of bed and sleep; the more I learn of sleep, the more it awes me. The things we don't know.

The dynamics of a smallish dollop of field caught between downtown and a parking lot allow me to pretend to be from this planet, prowling, gathering, inhaling. I am full of cat gladness, and we are quieting down into the dark release of memory, of breath, of response. Sleep well, all of you. A field is waiting.