Thorn

Weeds, stickers, thorns and a few dozen kinds of grass flourish in these coastal woods of Florida located at 28° N, 80° W. I’m pretty sure this is the place the man who invented Velcro found his fortune. I can’t walk across the yard without getting patches of Velcro-like stickers all around my cuffs, grabbing a thorny vine by mistake and getting half a dozen burrs on socks and shoelaces. We got it all out here: bedstraw, beggar’s lice, scratchweed and catchweed. Most of the time it’s a minor irritation and plays second fiddle to things like red ants and mosquitos. All part of the big picture out here, which is on most days a good place to be.

A couple of weeks back when I was down the road doing something with neighbor Lamar, the dawg wandered into a patch of grass that was mostly what I call devil burrs, tiny round bulbs spiked all over with needle thorns. Whole thing’s no bigger than a green pea but plain hell to get shed of. Not for the first time Farina came hobbling out of the grass with her pads stuck full of burrs. I did what I always do and pulled the burrs out of her feet, shaking them off my fingers as best I could. I thought no more about it until I got back to the house and felt something in my thumb. It was one of those needle thorns so small I could hardly see it stuck in my thumb.

I tried a dozen times to get that thing out and never even got close. Like I had a sliver of glass in a finger and couldn’t do anything about it. I walked next door to see if Randy’s wife Jean could work the thorn out since she had once before pulled a small splinter out of my hand. She dug around in my thumb for a while, saying she might have gotten it, she couldn’t see anything in there. I went home satisfied but felt the thorn again the next day. I lived with it for a few days, thinking it would work its way out. Never happened. Next time I went over to see Jean she said she was going to try something her mother used to do. First off, she worked a needle around the sore spot to open it up, then took a small piece of salt pork and taped it to my thumb. You coulda wrapped a package with all the tape she used. The salt pork was supposed to draw the thorn out of my thumb. 

But it was all for naught, just as all the digging with needles, spotlights and magnifying glasses were. On the second day of the salt pork poultice I started to worry that aging animal fat pressed against an open hole in my thumb was creepy and risky sounding so I snatched it off and saw the chitterling-sized bit of pork fat had dissolved into my thumb-hole. Now I'm worried that while the thorn is still there, I might contract a case of end-around trichinosis.

Spent a good part of yesterday on the back porch, the air, weather and sky perfect in every way. Hearing the acorns, bits of twig and branch fall onto the tin roof in the breeze, it made me think about the sound of a child’s blocks or Tinker Toys clattering on a tabletop in the next room. The backyard is pretty and trim now with a fresh cutting and the red ants are checking out of their gasoline bathed nests. Sitting there with the newspaper I read that in New York City, a 12 year-old boy pulled a gun on a girl in the subway station and demanded one of her chicken nuggets. She refused to give him one.

Almost forgot, when I was at Lamar’s pulling burrs out of Farina’s feet, Lamar’s fishing buddy was there. He drives a dusty old Chevrolet, faded red with a bumper sticker that says, "Redneck Lives Matter." I wanted to take a picture with my phone but was afraid I might rouse suspicions.