The phrase appeared in my great-aunt’s notebook between a recipe for seed cake and instructions for removing rust from garden tools. Beside it she had written a rough translation about worthless things growing wherever they were allowed to root. A thistle filled the margin, traced repeatedly in black ink until the paper had worn almost transparent along the stem.
The spring after she died, thistles emerged along the old property line. They came up weeks before anything else and followed the boundary with surveyor’s precision, turning at corners long since obscured by hedges and crossing beneath a gravel drive without breaking formation. When I checked the original deed, I discovered the line matched a strip of land she had sold forty years earlier after a dispute with the neighboring family.
The plants behaved unlike ordinary weeds. Cutting them produced two stalks by morning. Herbicide darkened the leaves for several hours before they returned greener than before. Digging out the roots revealed pale runners descending deeper than I could follow, all angled toward the neighboring property.
Her notebook contained additional entries once I knew what to search for. She had recorded arguments, encroachments, missing fence posts, and livestock allowed to wander across the boundary. Over the years the tone changed from anger to maintenance. She noted when the thistles first appeared, where they weakened, and which sections required reseeding. The final pages treated the border with the practical attention other people give gutters or furnaces.
I stopped pulling the plants after finding the last entry. She had written that boundaries neglected too long eventually forget what they are protecting and remember only that they must hold.
Since then I have walked the line every evening. The thistles remain thick and orderly, though their flowers now turn toward me as I pass. Last week several stalks appeared ten feet inside my property, forming a second boundary that encloses the house itself.
I checked the notebook again. Beneath the old thistle drawing, faint enough to miss before, she had sketched two concentric lines around a small square marked HOME. I still do not know whether the outer growth was meant to keep something from crossing onto our land or whether the inner one is preparing for the possibility that it already has.
©2013 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys
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