The Bite of Spring

The Bite of Spring
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday November 2, 2013

I can smell spring in the air. The plane trees have burst into a canopy of lacy green shoots. After ten minutes in the sun I can feel it biting the back of my neck. I dig out the sunscreen from the bathroom cupboard. With my two urchins, we take our prized Manchester United soccer ball and head down to the park. (The ball was a Royal Show special – my six-year-old now fancies himself as the next Ronaldo).

We slip off our shoes and gallop around on the grass. A wayward kick sends the ball rolling over a lush circle of green and we three take off after it, small daughter shouting over her shoulder: “That was a rubbish shot, Mummy!” (She has all the class of a soccer hooligan).

Our doughy winter feet thud over a patch of prickles, camouflaged by the soft clover: “Yowwww!” Three year old freezes, then bursts into tears, unsure what has attacked her. Her left foot is a dartboard peppered with tiny spines. One by one I pull them out while she shrieks in my ear.

Six year old son hobbles towards me, also yelping. His pain threshold hovers around zero so I put him in a loving headlock and begin removing each prickle. (Competing against a squirming child, the maternal pincer grip is woefully inadequate). At last, his foot is prickle-free. We limp for home, my own feet still stubbled with quills. Surely it’s too early for blasted Bindy-eye prickles? I can’t believe there’s been enough sun to harden the little blighters.

Bindii weed has earned the collective hatred of generations of Australians: spiky land mines lying in wait for bare feet. As kids, we called it ‘Jo-Jo.’ We’d get our own back by crawling around the lawn on our hands and knees pulling up every juvenile weed we saw. We’d pinch out the still green prickles and unravel their tightly coiled burrs, stringing them out in lines on the footpath. Then we’d stand back and admire the body count, satisfied that at least one patch of lawn would give us safe passage to the back door.

By January, any undiscovered Jo-Jo prickles had hardened their ability to inflict maximum pain. The baking sun turned the lawn dry and crispy by 10am. A Jo-Jo spike could spear an 8-year-old’s heel so flush to the skin that not even Mum’s eyebrow tweezers could get a grip on the butt end. “Go and rub your foot on the bricks” Mum’d say. I’d gingerly scrape my heel against the paving, hoping friction would dislodge the thorn. If it worked, the relief was instant. (Though like a Pavlovian dog, I’d already conditioned myself to walking on tiptoe).

Other times, that spike in my heel would refuse to budge. Later that morning, I’d gently test my foot for the umpteenth time, applying my full weight to gauge the pain. There’d be a twinge, but I couldn’t be sure if it was now an imaginary hurt and the prickle had left me hours ago.

Last week, I happened to be talking prickles with the bloke who owns our much-loved icecream bar. He remembers growing up in Geraldton when thongs came in black and brown and cost $2 at Woolies.

“We’d bolt into the house from the backyard and the only thing you’d hear was the ‘crack, crack, crack’ as the doublegees crunched into the lino as we walked. We’d take off our thongs and they’d be caked with the suckers. Big, nasty ones they were, like police road spikes – no matter which way they lay, one of those damn thorns pointed upwards. When a three-cornered jack got your foot, you’d show off the hole.”

Country doublegees were to town weeds what a King Brown was to a gecko. When we were on summer holidays in Kalbarri, the locals would warn us: “Watch out for that Tanner’s curse – s’like a plague this year. It’ll leave fork-holes in your soft city feet!” (I could only presume Mr Tanner was the bright spark who sailed into Fremantle from Capetown in 1830, thinking his doublegee plant might make a nice salad vegetable).

Instead, doublegees took over. They stabbed bike tyres and clung on so you’d have to replace the tube. They jammed the blades of Uncle Andy’s lawnmower and gave me new words to take to school: ‘bloody bastards!’ Doublegees lamed dogs, matted sheep’s wool and contaminated grain harvests.

Standing chatting on the verge with our next-door neighbours at the weekend, I saw the wife was holding a bucket and a three-pronged gardening fork: “Weeds wrecking the lawn already?” I asked.

“Jo-Jo.” she replied, shaking her head.

“I know, our littlest one got her first foot-full down the park yesterday!”

“How’d she take it?” the husband asked.

“Oh, it was awful – she was howling and dancing around not knowing what was happening and getting more and more prickles.”

“The Rite of Spring ballet!” he laughed.

I hadn’t thought of it that way.