Everyday, so many amazing things happen in life and I'm always taking a mental inventory, "I must blog about that!" But life just continues to go at such a warp speed, I feel like all I can do is just hang on and enjoy the ride ... while trying not to fall off the ride altogether. (Have I written that before? Probably. Not much has changed!!)
"It's just a mirage, this idea that we can ever tame nature to do as we want ... it's not permanent. Work as we might, toil as we do to pull the weeds, edge the grass, hedge the shrubs, and prune the trees - the result is only temporary. It's fighting against the tide and NATURE WILL ULTIMATELY WIN."
Then I had this thought, immediately on the heels of that brilliance.
"Tending a garden is a lot like raising children. You sow the seeds and water them and nurture them and pour a small fortune in to their growth and development, and work your body to exhaustion to maintain them, and you think that as they mature, you have a very good idea of what and who they will be. But then they bloom and what you THOUGHT would be an orange flower, is yellow; and the green is blue, and the pink is white. The vine that you thought would go up, goes across, and in the middle of an area you thought was full of weeds - sprouts sunflowers."
Life is just one huge, beautiful surprise.
It feels like we're even more aware of that phenomenon, now that we're living in a totally new environment in northern Vermont, with four kids who are on the brink of adulthood. I've told my mom that spring in this part of the country is violently natural and unlike anything I've ever experienced (so, too, are 17-year olds!). We moved in to this house in the latter part of fall when everything was dormant. Winter was magical - everything coated in snow, so we had no idea what was in store. On April 18th we had a huge snowstorm with nearly two-feet of snow. I cannot recall having snow on my birthday - until this year. It was wonderful.
By early May, the yard started to wake up. By early June, it was a literal jungle out there. For the past six weeks, we've had landscaping crews AND a gardener coming by several times a week and even the professionals were drowning in this yard. They clear out one area, and two weeks later, it's grown over again. We have a team of arborists coming in next month to take down several huge trees and do some of the cleanup work that we lack the yellow iron to tackle.
During this time, I've realized that you can tell a lot about a person's personality by the way they are in the garden. Charlie skips outside every morning with his watering can, to give a drink to all the vegetables he has grown from seeds. He focuses on one thing at a time - in this moment, he's dealing with his cucumbers; when that is done, he'll shift focus to pruning the hundreds of peonies. His energy isn't deterred by the flowering sumac that has summited a fence and is now growing across our lawn faster than tidewaters during a full moon in the Bay of Fundy.
Likewise, he does not appear distracted by the sometimes crazy teenagers and their wild mood and attitude fluctuations. He just smiles and keeps doing whatever it is that needs doing: Cooking dinner, washing dishes, folding laundry. I cannot comprehend how he maintains his focus, it's like he has on blinders to the natural insanity around us.
Meanwhile, I go outside to weed the Lily of the Valleys on the north side of the house, and go to the tool shed to grab a spade. On my way, I am distracted by the hydrangeas on the east side of the house that needs pruning. When I get to the shed, instead of a spade, I grab the saw, but as I'm walking back - I stop to cut the lilacs blocking the path. Here I remain for a whole 15 minutes, before I realize I need heavier machinery to remove some of the dead limbs. With a sigh of resignation, I survey the yard, and spot the maple seedlings sprouting up in the violets; soon I'm knee deep in the violet beds yanking maples by the handful. And so it goes, everyday. Surely progress is being made, no one has really touched these grounds for several years; but it's just hard to see it - when you're in it.
Likewise, as I was helping our girls this week pack for a three week trip, including two-weeks backpacking in New Mexico ... I was completely derailed when I opened their sock drawer and found the home to nearly all the single socks that have been accumulating in our laundry room. Down the rabbit hole I went, and started opening all the other drawers, closets, not just in the girls rooms but in the boys rooms, too. Over the next three hours, I generated no less than four bags of donations for Goodwill and rematched nearly every one of our socks. How did this happen?!
If you give a mouse a cookie? If you give me any task it would seem.
For someone like me who craves a degree of control in my life, and obviously has a serious case of ADD, I'm pretty tired. It's taken me 51 years, but I'm finally appreciating that I could work all day and never get everything done so there's no point in working to exhaustion.
You've got to just enjoy what you CAN DO, and try to find the beauty in what might seem like NATURE GONE WILD. Otherwise, you will end up drained, perpetually dehydrated, sunburned, cranky, and achy. Our gardener, Ann, told me earlier this season that some of the weeds, including Blue Wood Aster, and even dandelions, are especially beautiful.
Just look for and enjoy the colors; they're everywhere.
Funny enough, it was today, when I was finally back again, weeding the Lily of the Valleys, I had these revelations and after a whole 10 minutes, decided to come inside, have a drink of water, and take a break. Now I'm enjoying a Haagen Daz bar and updating my blog for the first time in four months. Charlie saw I was in the house eating an ice cream and has come to join me. This is true romance.
ADD for the win.
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