Yesterday, I walked out of my mother’s apartment to find her neighbor hiding in my mother’s front flower bed. She was holding a paintbrush along with a transparent bowl with a brown liquid in it.
“I’m taking care of the horsetails in your mother’s garden,” the neighbor said.
“What makes them need taking care of?” I asked.
“They’re a really nasty weed,” she said. “This pesticide is the only thing that can get rid of them.”
“What makes horsetails so nasty?”
“They’re really tough,” said the neighbor. “They’re an ancient weed, older than the dinosaurs. They grow in poor soil that other plants don’t like. They have silica in their tissues, and no matter how often you cut them down, they just keep on growing back from the roots.”
“Yes,” I persisted, “but what’s the nasty thing about them?”
She paused, then shook her head at me, wrinkling her nose and forehead, saying, “You can’t get rid of them.”
It was obvious to me then that the conversation was at an end. To me, a plant that will grow in soil where other plants won’t grow seemed like an asset any gardener should appreciate. To my mother’s neighbor, however, the very fact that a plant could not be easily killed made it “nasty”. She wanted a garden in which only fragile plants, carefully nurtured by the gardener, were allowed to survive. What’s more, this obsessive ideal was so important to her that she was sneaking around her neighbors’ gardens, getting rid of plants that violated her exacting horticultural sensibilities.
Since that day, whenever I think of the emotional concept of being fastidious, I think of this woman creeping around my mother’s flower bed, painting pesticide onto a perfectly harmless plant. A fastidious nature is characterized by an insistence upon the application of excessive standards. To be fastidious is to go beyond reason into an emotionally-driven preoccupation, a nervous feeling that unless everything is in absolute compliance with one’s expectations, the world will fall apart. A fastidious feeling goes too far, carrying poison into the florid garden of life.
