Pruning

My Grandmother once boiled a lobster in front of me.

This was after I had already named it Herman.

We had purchased it at the grocery store earlier in the day along with a good amount of Kosher salt. To me, this seemed like a massively obvious paradox. Herman was a lobster. The Kosher ship had already sailed.

She had told the woman, the poor, unfortunate woman whose job it was to pluck live lobsters out of a salt water tank to find a "fighter, as she was always fond of making demands that seemed simultaneously nebulous and obvious. This, too, seemed an odd request of something that she planned to boil alive later that evening. It was as though there was something to be gained by killing the strongest lobster, the one with the most fearsome claws, the one who had dominated his patch of ocean-floor until he fell into one of the simplest traps imaginable. None of that strength would save him. When it came down to it, he would fall into the inferno of boiling water without a fuss, cooked to death in the salt water where he had once lived without any drama.

"You shouldn't feel bad. Their brains aren't big enough to know what's even happening."

For the third time that day, I was entirely befuddled.

How smart, I thought, do you need to be to know the life is being boiled out of you?

****

My mother always hated when my grandmother did things around the house without being asked to do them. It was, she mentioned, a tactic she has always used to put her hosts on edge and subtly criticize them in a way that could not be retaliated against. Who could, realistically, fault someone for unloading a dish washer, waking up early to start a pot of coffee, or drive to Home Depot and planting marigolds (a flower my mother hates, finding their scent offensive and their symbolism morbid and too closely associated with ghosts). My grandmother dismissed this, saying that her family always fed marigold petals to chickens and it turned their eggs the most lovely color of orange. Their meat, too.
-"But does it taste any different?" 
-"No, but that isn't the point."
I ultimately sided with my mother. It seemed like a bad deal for the chickens and, honestly, what house wants ghosts before the mortgage is paid off?

****

I picked my grandmother flowers as she was busy chopping off rose heads from the slightly un-manicured bramble on the side of the house.

They were, plainly speaking, an entirely dazzling shade of blue. The color, I decided, of the sky right before a snow storm but minute and numerous like the scattered bits of unused gems too small to make satisfying jewelry, but none-the-less valuable if for no other reason than their clarity and beauty.

"Those are weeds."

She said this with no judgment nor remorse. She simply identified them without accepting them.

"Where did you find those?"

"In the yard in front of the house."

"Show me where when I finish here. We need to get rid of them."

"But they're so pretty."

"They'll make your yard look horrible."

She said this as she wrapped her fingers tightly around the red-velvet petals of a slightly aging rose. She took no care not to bruise or crush it. She pinched the plush cushion of plant and it splattered like fabric fallen to the floor. Without pausing, she snipped it off and tossed it to the ground in a pile of thorn branches and mint-green leaves.

She didn't wait for me to ask.

"It was dead. I had to cut it or it would hurt the other roses."

It made no sense to me.

"It didn't look dead."

"Look at the edges. They were going brown."

I picked up the discarded head, lovely now in a tragic way, the way that something that has peaked, that only faces the process of decay can look in the last moment of its life that it can claim beauty. After a moment, I noticed it. A small spot on a petal, slightly darker than the rest of the head, a discoloration that would only be spotted by someone looking for an imperfection.

"If you don't want the rest of them to die, those have to go."

She snipped again. However, this time, the browning of the petals was more obvious.

****

As I waited for the school bus the next morning, I noticed the weeds were gone, pulled up by the roots and sprinkled with some sort of powder that had not harmed the grass.

For reasons I could not explain, I thought of chickens nestled in hay, eating petals that would make them all the prettier to the person who would one day cut off their heads.