Be a Weed

Learning from Christienne L. Hinz in this year’s stellar edition of Best American Essays

“Rain,” Beth Kephart, Marbled Paper

Here, the rain has finally come. Long slashes across dusty windows, brief puddles of light in the sky. The ponds, the creeks, the reservoirs have been low. We have missed the sound of falling water. My outlaw wildflower garden is singe and matted dead leaves, hoping for a next season.

My companion of late has been The Best American Essays 2024 (Wesley Morris, editor; Kim Dana Kupperman, series editor). It’s a stellar collection. Brock Clarke’s “Woodstove” begins with the simple utterance “My dog just died” and quickly unfolds as narratively innovative, masterfully paced, and devastatingly poignant. Nicole Graev Lipson’s “As They Like It: Learning to Follow My Child’s Lead” is one of the finest essays merging the concertina folds of literature and the mysteries of motherhood I think I’ve ever read. Rémy Ngamije’s “Love Is a Washing Line,” which places marriage within the contours of a boxing ring, is an essay I will read again and again for what it teaches about the management of time, theme, and metaphor.

The final essay in the book is by the historian, master gardener, and writer Christienne L. Hinz, and it’s called “A Rewilding.” “I think I might be a weed,” is the only sentence in the first paragraph. After that we are given metaphorically expansive definitions (“A weed is any plant that dares show its face in an unexpected place without the gardener’s express permission”), potent illustrations of the “human imposition of monoculture on nature, in this case the tyranny of the suburban lawn,” and the power of personal politics, by which I mean Hinz’s decision to “def[y] the Cult of Respectability by taking three whole years to establish a clay-busting native shortgrass prairie on the sunny side of my front lawn,” among other things. This is social history, this is natural history,  this is White Gaze history, this is a very personal story. It is also, in its final gorgeous paragraph, a call to action that—in these early hours, on this particular day, in a world gone bonkers and a life I sometimes don’t recognize as I search for my voice and stumble, search for my voice and start again—wish to find a way to heed.

These are Hinz’s words:

“I say be a weed. Find your inborn wildness. Don’t let anyone rob you of your fecundity. Set copious seed. Your offspring and their friends, and their offspring and their friends, are welcome in my yard. We’ll play loud music and party in the driveway until the sun goes down. And we’ll watch the fireflies come out.”