The Daytime Moon

The Daytime Moon                                                                                                                                      Kyung Ku Lee   This afternoon I visited a small business located in the seaside village of the City of Des Moines. My daughter and her husband run the store and it is within 15 minutes’ drive from Village at Miller’s Creek where I live.  I watered the marigold flowers that were basking in Seattle’s warm autumn sun in the front flower garden of the two-story building with a western exposure first. As I stooped down and pulled newly grown weeds I felt my backache. I cut off the roots with a trowel, pulled them out and then got up. I gathered the weeds and put them into a paper bag. When I looked at the sky, I found a daytime moon.  I bent my back and pulled up the rest of the weeds. Feeling a pain in my back again I stood up and stretched it. The Puget Sound, surrounded by green woods, came into view in the westerly direction. The Sound is where salmons gather. Salmons rendezvous in the Sound around this time and are headed for their native streams or lakes.  I looked at the cracks between the concrete garden border and the asphalt parking lot. I found weeds with saw-toothed leaves. Some of the weeds were in full bloom. I put on my leather gloves and grabbed the weeds and pulled them out. I also dug out the weeds in the crevices of the parking lot with my trowel.     In the spring, some sixty years ago, I attended middle school in the city located some distance from my native village. At that time my father worked for the provincial office while engaging in farming at home. My father kept a farmhand as well as a cow.  I welcomed the summer vacation of the first year of middle school. On that summer, increased wage given to farmhands kept my father from employing one. My father was very anxious because he had no farmhand to cut the grass to feed the cow. It was the cow that did the farm work.  Every day after lunch I went out to the field to cut the grass for the cow. I cut soft weeds that the cow liked, put a big load on the A-frame carrier, and carried it home at dusk on my back. My father took the grass to the cow in the cow house while my mother prepared supper on the floor for me.  I was so bad at using the sickle that I often cut my fingers when cutting grass. I counted the big and small scars left on my fingers on the last day of my summer vacation and found that there were ten of them. The scars looked like the daytime moon in the shape of an eyebrow.  Today the scars left by the sickle are covered with thick wrinkles. However, some big scars are still visible. They remind me of the nobility of labor.