Cracks in the Cement Where Resilience Grows

There is always space to be made

Photo by Carl Campbell on Unsplash

I had found myself aimlessly scratching my leg again, tiger-striped pink and swollen slashes along my ankles. God, this is so annoying.

There’s a tiny, narrow sidewalk near my house, an unavoidable cement path you have to traverse if you need to get to or come back from the only train station in the area. Lined between a tall stone wall and a waist-high guardrail, on most days walking down the path feels unremarkable, on rainy days you may awkwardly bump umbrellas with a stranger passing by. It’s a little uncomfortable for two people to walk side by side, and just barely wide enough for a bicycle to get through.

But I don’t mind the closeness, I’ve dealt with narrower sidewalks before. No, what’s frustrating about this path is what grows between the microscopic cracks in the cement, naked to the eye but an apparently obvious home for mother nature: the weeds.

It’s not like my city neglects its public roads. Every few months I will find that the weeds have been plucked, pulled, and wrestled out of those little crevices by the city. They’ve even redone the sidewalk a few times the past several years, filling cement in the cracks where random grasses had forcibly decided to grow. But every time the sidewalk is cleared bare, it only takes a few…