The Mighty Red

by Louise Erdrich

‘As I say, the important thing isn’t money,’ said his father. ‘It is when a man cooks for a woman and later makes heated and trustworthy love to her.’

It was the region’s life giver, but also it was a treacherous brown vein of trifluralin, atrazine, polychlorinated biphenyls, VOCs, and mercury, not to mention uprooted trees and sunken cars.

Somehow, they would rise.

She was sometimes too tired to have emotions and had started acting rationally.

You could tell things from the smell of the pages. For instance, this Madame Bovary had been kept in a dry, bright room on an unpainted wooden shelf.

Dual Magnum. Roundup. Warrant. Outlook. Chloroacetamide. Betamix. Ethofumesate. UpBeet. Gramoxone.

2009 weed of the year, Chenopodium album,

Like her, Emma had been bored and furious. Except she wanted romance and Kismet had too much of it. Kismet wanted other things. But until she knew what she wanted she wouldn’t give up on what she had.

‘Whatever Emma would do,’ she said out loud, ‘I should do the opposite.’

harebells, globe mallow, Queen Anne’s lace, blanketflowers, new milkweed,

A weed is just a plant that grows in the wrong place, and Crystal decided that if she had any sympathy for Martin, that feeling was a weed.

The dandelion was chosen by North Dakota State University as Weed of the Year in 2009. Cheerful, indomitable, persistent (seeds stay viable for at least five years), poetic, hermaphroditic, edible, medicinal, bitter, and enduring.

Dandelions had spread across every continent because their wind-borne seeds were tiny; they sank deep taproots, and they did not require pollinators because they were both male and female. They persisted also because of their habit of bringing sunny cheer after winters of exhaustion. Some people and most parks gave up, simply welcomed them in spring, and mowed them down before they made seeds. They were the sun when they bloomed, the moon when they formed seed heads, and the stars when you blew on the fragile globes.

She’d left the found words I have never felt such bliss in yet another book, a very dry study on the properties of land snails.

You hit forty and it’s a going-out-of-business sale.’ ‘Me?’ ‘Yeah, it’s hormonal. You’re slashing prices. Lowering your standards. Everything must go.’

Across the horizon a band of gray dust wavered. The sun would go down in a bloody stew. Every night was like the end of the world. It was gorgeous!