Micro Cuts - Perennial Wisdom with Judith Fetterley

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Micro-Cuts
JUDITH FETTERLEY

NOV 7

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November 7, 2023
Micro-Cuts
The gardens are ready for winter. The garage is swept and ordered, the ornaments and garden furniture brought into the swept and ordered garage, the hoses neatly coiled and stored in the not swept or ordered basement. Yes, there is raking left to do, off the lawn, but the bulk of the work for the 2023 season is done.
This year I have left the leaves on garden beds. The leaves will keep the soil temperature more even, avoiding frost heaves and they will keep the soil wet, protecting the valuable microbes. If the leaves decompose at all they will feed the soil.
I doubt I can hold off spring clean-up until daytime temperatures consistently reach the 50s in order to avoid harming the beneficial insects that hunker down for the winter in leaf litter as adults or as eggs or pupae. To manage my garden at my age I need to be out early, and some gardens, not all, need to be raked on a warm day in March.
My hands are ready for winter as well. In the garden season, they are home to multiple micro-cuts, and I am often bleeding when I work. I don’t wear gloves because I need to feel the precise depth of a garden weed from the resistance it presents to my fingers or the appropriate size of a hole to dig from the mass a new plant presents to my palm. However, my weeder is two-pronged and very sharp, and the hori hori knife is equally sharp with a serrated edge. Sometimes I misjudge the stroke and my weeder strikes my finger or my hori hori hits my palm. I do not stop just because of blood.
This year taking down the demonstration gardens at the Cornell Cooperative Extension was particularly bloody because we started well before a killing frost turned plants to mush. Remaining stems were sharp. I managed to garner a dramatic wound on our last day from, of all things, a Hosta stem.
There was a tinge of sadness as we took our break because we would not be working together again for several months. I picked up a napkin to deal with my wound and another to get a cookie. Fellow gardeners noticed the cut, and a conversation ensued on the wearing or not wearing of gloves.
I don’t mind the cuts I get when I garden. After all, I am inflicting cuts on the plants. I consider this mutual exchange of bodily fluids as a ritual. I also recall that the microbes in the soil that stimulate serotonin release get into my blood stream through these micro-cuts. I can honestly claim that my weeder is my best anti-depressant.
Since our gathering, however, I have been reflecting on a different kind of micro-cuts. With the world at large and at home so completely on fire, I narrow my focus to the day at hand and my immediate surroundings. How can I ensure that in my daily life I do not add to the violence of the world? It is relatively easy to eliminate the big ones – I am not carrying a gun or shooting anyone; I am not engaged in knife fights or fist fights; I am not screaming at my neighbors as they pour poisons on their lawns. I watch my words.
But there it is. How carefully do I watch my words?
From my work as a teacher, I have long been aware of the concept of micro-aggression, a term used, according to Wikipedia, for “commonplace verbal, behavioral or environmental slights, whether intentional or unintentional, that communicate hostile, derogatory, or negative attitudes toward stigmatized or culturally marginalized groups.” How often do I slip into such usage, referring to small fib, for example, as a white lie or, without thinking, reiterating my father’s praise of good behavior as “that was mighty white of you.” Not often, I hope, but enough to remind me that aggression can occur on a scale both large and small and that sometimes the small can feel large.
As an older woman, I am the subject of micro-aggressions directed at both my age and gender. It is constant and it is depressing. “How are you, young lady,” I get from an older man at the checkout counter of the grocery store. I want to reply that I am neither young nor a lady, but I don’t. I just absorb. “What are you girls talking about,” I get from a man who feels it is his right to interrupt my conversation and that I will be pleased to be called a girl. “Look at him,” a mother says to a child, viewing a tiger at the zoo clearly labelled Lily. “Isn’t he beautiful?” Unwittingly, she tells the boy that strength and power belong to males and that creatures who elicit affection and respect must be male.
The problem is compounded when the micro-aggression occurs in a context of friendship and good feeling and is meant as part of that celebration of companionship. Shortly after the incident with my bloody hand and the possible chocolate chip cookie and the conversation about gloves, our Master Gardener talk turned to Halloween. We shared stories about the number of visitors we had this year and the items we gave out. And about our favorite costumes.
Top of the list was that of a boy. His costume was a magnet with chicks attached. I didn’t get it until someone said, “Chick magnet.” We all agreed it was clever, but I kept thinking, I don’t want some ten-year-old boy learning to think of my ten-year-old granddaughter as a “chick.” I felt it as a micro-cut. a wee wound.
I did not speak up; it was our last time together and the mood mattered.
And yet I can’t stop thinking about it. So many of the micro-cuts of gender appear in contexts where the speaker thinks they are being complimentary or where it would be bad form to object, where in fact to object opens you up to further micro-aggressions — what’s the matter with you? can’t you take a joke? you are taking this far too seriously, it’s a compliment. It is hard to speak up for fear of creating more violence in the effort to reduce violence.
But at what point do the micro-cuts add up to a wound that must be addressed? And to what degree is the humor a harbinger of violence? Is it possible that behind the “fun” of chick magnet lurks the attitude that creates a culture in which more than 600 women are raped every day in the United States and more than one third of women murdered in the U.S. are killed by someone who “loves” them?
Is it possible that not speaking out is itself a form of violence?

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