Weeding

The sun’s gone but I work on in the garden, wanting to get the old dead rosebush out. I feel its reluctance, and coax it slowly from the heavy citrusy leaves. A broken branch scratches my arm as the bush suddenly gives. But it’s still hung up; I need to unlace the wooden trellis from the hedge, too—the way it was when I moved out of my rented Victorian sunporch and everybody laughed at me for having to saw my bicycle out of the vines that bound it, the old turquoise English racing bike I loved once, for its poetry, but never rode.

Because it feels like summer I make some of the margaritas I’ve invented with blue agave tequila, Key Lime juice, and apricot liqueur, shaken in an old jar. The tequila is called “reposado”—Resting? In repose? The thought of it is almost better than its taste. In it, reposado, azul, is the desert at dusk, the blue shadows of the hills around Tucson or on down into Mexico. There’s a tequila shortage, I heard the clerk at BevMo tell another customer this afternoon. Disease, maybe, or agave thieves in rattly old pickups?

I try not to kick over the glass in the dark, set on the sidewalk against the house wall while I hack a little more off of the hedge with my loose-hinged kitchen scissors.