I indulged myself a bit this morning. I read Mary’s blog first thing. I don’t normally do that. It is Friday and I have much to do. In fact, my blog is normally done over a period of two or three days. Not constantly over two or three days, but kind of like letting a plant grow over a period of weeks or months. But this week my mind is hard to bring into focus. Too much of a personal nature going on. So, I read Mary first and it got me to thinking.

          Without getting into what she wrote (if you want to know what she wrote, go to her blog and read it at https://mary-marysmoments.blogspot.com/) she discussed the difference between weeds and grass. She brings it into the Spiritual realm and it is quite interesting. But with my scatter gun brain this week, my mind took off in another direction.

          Growing up on a farm, I was taught that weeds were our mortal enemy. If you let them get ahead of you, they would destroy the corn and the soybeans and choke off the garden. Meanwhile, we had a couple of acres of rolling lawn of mostly Kentucky blue grass. Beautiful stuff. Only I didn’t see it like my parents saw it. We didn’t spray our fields so we had to run the cultivator through them. Each field was cultivated once a week, which kept me busy all week. This was done until the corn or beans got high enough that the cultivator might damage the crop. By that time, the weeds were not going to be a problem. I have two sisters and their job was to hoe the garden, so I didn’t care about those weeds. The grass in the lawn was another matter. My father didn’t believe in riding mowers, so I mowed the grass with a hand mower. You were walking either up hill or down hill. Given my choice, I would have rather ridden on a tractor attacking the weeds than pushing a hand mower up and down grass covered hills.

          Growing older, I began to notice other things. My mother worked hard in her flower gardens to make her blooms beautiful. Meanwhile, wild weeds often had small blooms that were just as beautiful. I pointed this out to Mom one day and was surprised at her reaction, which was not good. After that, being the good and loving son, I pointed this out quite often. Always got the same reaction from my mother. I think I drove her crazy.

          And, just for the record, who made the decision that a pansy is a flower and a dandelion is a weed? I have read that the dandelion is part of the sunflower family. You can eat parts of it, use other parts to make tea and still other parts to make wine. And it is abundant. Pansies take time and work and all you can do with a pansy is look at it. Personally, a dandelion filled yard is a welcoming yard.

          Anyway, we are talking about weeds. The area I come from is hilly with some deep valleys. There is also a vast difference in soil content. Just in our township, the area from Lake Erie to North Ridge Road is all sandy. Between North Ridge Road and Middle Ridge Road it is a mix of sand and loam and is very fertile. From Middle Ridge Road to South Ridge Road it is a combination sandy, loam and clay, also very fertile. Mostly, we farmed between North Ridge Road and South Ridge Road, although we did have a forty acre field north of North Ridge. Being hilly, we didn’t have a lot of acreage together like here, but the fields were apart from one another. It was just different. And, while there were differences in the soil and fields running from north to south, there were also differences running from east to west. I grew up in Lake County. The next county to the east was Ashtabula County. And, right at the county line, the soil changed yet again. Ashtabula County is Ohio’s grape country. Wines and jellies and juices and some of the best grapes you could ever eat come from Ashtabula County. The wines win awards against Napa Valley brands and even win awards in international competition. A large portion of Welch’s jams and jellies and juices come from Ashtabula County. Many of the rolling hills in Ashtabula County are covered with vineyards rather than corn and soybeans while in Lake County you would be hard pressed to find a single grape arbor. Another wonderful thing no one really knows about unless you live among grapes is that every year, right about now, the grapes are coming in and the smell is amazing. And between the rows in the vineyards are weeds. Mowed and kept short, but weeds.

Mary’s blog set me to thinking about the difference between weeds and grass, which led over to the soil from north to south back in Northeast Ohio, which led my fevered brain to think about how odd it is that on the west side of Countyline Road the soil is rich and good for crops and on the east side of Countyline Road it is wonderful grape soil. And I should finish this travelogue by pointing out that on the eastern side of Ashtabula County to the Pennsylvania state line and on into Pennsylvania is apple country and the home of apple cider donuts. Ooooooooooooooooooo!

You see, when a person’s mind is fractured it can go in a dozen different directions. And there is still one more major wrinkle in this mindless wandering.

I pastored in Geneva, Ohio for years. Geneva is in Ashtabula County and is actually where most of the grapes are grown. For many years, Coca Cola had a bottling plant in Geneva. They didn’t bottle Coke, though. They bottled Welch’s grape juice and apple juice and peach juice. Big operation, lots of people worked there. And they had offices and labs and such like places that needed cleaning. For a while when we first went to Geneva, I needed a part time job I could do at night and they needed someone to clean these places. So, I got a part time job at the bottling plant.

You cleaned the front offices, then you walked through the darkened plant to the labs in the back of the building and cleaned those. It was a long walk through the darkened rows of machines and equipment. It never bothered me. I was never afraid that someone might be there. Mostly my thoughts centered on when the church was going to be able to afford me full time. (Which actually happened pretty quickly, much to their surprise.)

But then one night, one o’clock in the morning, I knew I was being watched. I was about halfway through the plant when I felt it. Eyes. Someone was watching me as I walked through. I was suddenly alert. My pace slowed as I scanned through the plant, although other than distant EXIT signs there was no light. I reached the labs and set to work cleaning them, but my mind wouldn’t rest. No one was supposed to be in there, so if someone was, they were up to no good. I locked the lab doors behind me. I cleaned and swept and mopped in pretty quick order and then gathered my cart and set out for the main offices. Walking through te dark I was straining my eyes to see anything. Then, I came around a particularly large machine and in the gloom I saw him. My height. All I could see was his silhouette. I didn’t know who it was, but I knew he didn’t belong and I figured I was in danger. I lashed out with a right that had all my strength behind it and I nailed him on the chin. He went straight down and I turned on my flashlight. It was a grisly sight.

Lying on the floor, not making a sound, was an old time heavy cardboard cutout of a Coca Cola deliveryman. What made it grisly was that I had knocked his head clean off. It was the kind of thing you might have seen somewhere in the 1940s advertising Coke. Why it was there, in a juice bottling plant, I don’t know. But I figured it had some age and was therefore valuable. I stood him up and retrieved his head and tried to tape it on with electrical tape. All I got was a jaunty Coke delivery guy who looked like he was walking with a broken neck. I hurried up to the main offices and checked out, figuring I would get a call the next day. I never did and two weeks later I was able to quit, so I never did find out what it was all about.

          There is a moral here……Never, ever get me started on weeds.