Some Hard Truths

Where did you imagine this post was going to take you?  

To Texas, where the police were afraid to go into an active shooter situation because the active shooter had an actual firearm?  To Johnny Depp and Amber Heard and its effect on the MeToo movement?  To inflation or the Russian invasion of Ukraine or Biden's plummeting poll numbers?  

Nope.  None of that serious stuff for me.  It's all out of my control.  I'm looking closer to home.  There are plants in my yard which annoy me.  Animals pooped out brittle brush and jumping cholla and palo verde starters and sure enough, without any help from me or my yard guys, they have thrived.

Unfortunately, the droppings were not made in consultation with the homeowner.  The animals just did their business and moved on.  The plants grew and grew and grew and now they are impinging and blocking and generally making a nuisance of themselves.

In and of themselves, they are beautiful.  The brittle bush is 4 feet tall and 5 feet wide.  When it blooms, it's covered in yellow flowers.  When it's not flowering, it's a grey and white mess right in front of my Texas Mountain Laurel.  Would that it had been pooped out 10' to the right.  There's a hole there that could use some filler.  But that didn't happen.  Instead, for 2 weeks a few times a year I'm amazed by the beauty.  The rest of the time it just sits there, annoying me.

I'm going to ask the yard guys to pull it up when they come on Wednesday.  The hard truth is, I can kill it with impunity.  It only hurts my heart a little..... okay.... a lot.

It's a perfectly healthy plant.  It's not endangering anyone or anything.  It's not spiky or lowering over our heads as we walk.  It's just in the wrong place.  It can't be transplanted; that just doesn't work ofr native plants without irrigation and support and more tending than I'm willing to give to something I didn't plant myself.

Yet sentencing it to death seems cruel.  

Yet looking at it aggravates me.

Is aggravation a sufficient motive for murder?