Motives

This past Saturday I spent most of the day doing yard work, and as I worked I thought about why I spend time gardening. At the end of that long day, I concluded that in my life I've worked in gardens for three main reasons: duty, pride, and love. (No, I am not going to write a three-part, structured essay on duty, pride, and love, although it is tempting.... Instead, it will be a meandering type of essay. :-)

As with many people, my early gardening days were required. The kids in our family spent long, hot days pulling morning glory out of the iris and roses in my Grandma's yard, and then we would come home and pull more weeds out of our yard and vegetable garden. (Or maybe we worked for only a couple of hours on those days, but when you are 10, weeding for two hours feels like all day.) We thought Grandma's iris and roses were beautiful, and at the end of the summer we enjoyed eating the fresh tomatoes and corn-on-the-cob from our vegetable garden. But we didn't really love gardening.

I think I really began to love it only when it was my own flower garden that I was taking care of and my own vegetables that I was picking. After my Grandma passed away at age 97, I was fortunate to live in her home for a short time with my husband and young family. In those years, her prize-winning iris and roses still thrived in the garden. I would to take my baby outside and lay him on a blanket on the lawn nearby as I pulled weeds out of the flowerbeds or snipped off the dry, dead flowers. On days like that, I loved it that I could care for those flowers that my Grandma loved so much. I loved it that iris and roses have such beautiful smells. And I loved it that the sense of smell, more than any other sense, is an intense trigger of memory. To this day, the smell of iris is the smell of my Grandma Almira.

Well, iris and the smell of overripe bananas. :)

While I worked in my yard this past Saturday, I realized my motive for doing yard work had little do do with love of gardening. I have two odd-shaped flowerbeds at the front of my house. One is round, right in the middle of the driveway, and that round flowerbed exists only because we needed to leave an open space in the driveway for utilities.

The other is a triangle, and sits in between our neighbor's yard and a driveway leading to my husband's shop at the back of our property. These flowerbeds are nowhere near a water source, so we planted water-wise plants and hoped they wouldn't require much care.

At first I really loved these flowerbeds. We mostly chose plants that are low to the ground and spread to fill up empty space.

To encourage spreading, we didn't lay down any landscape textile or bark chips, but instead just kept open dirt.

This was an OK idea as long as I loved the flowerbeds. But this summer, I decided I loved other things more. The time I may have chosen to spend in the flowerbeds earlier this summer, I spent instead working in the vegetable garden, or practicing music for community events, or attempting--actually "for reals" this time--to start writing a blog. (And my husband spent his time on many other projects, which I will write about elsewhere.)

So the flowerbeds turned into weed patches.

(Note: The landscaping textile you see in the lower left of the photo above is to keep worms from climbing up into the cherry tree. It is not a sign of me actually learning how to control weeds with technology.)

It was fortunate that it was a wet June and July, because at least God watered the plants so they didn't die. I did go out there and pull out the most heinous weeds when they went to seed so I wouldn't spread ill will around the neighborhood.

This weekend near the end of the summer I finally went out and worked in those flowerbeds, and the only reason I decided to do it is because I didn't want people to think ill of me. It came down to this: The boy next door is getting married on Friday. My street will be full of visitors coming to attend his garden reception. I couldn't stand the idea of displaying such garden neglect to a hundred or more people.

So as I attacked the weeds on Saturday, I had to admit that I was doing so mostly out of pride. And that wasn't very fun to have to admit to myself. As I worked throughout the day--rolling up a carpet of morning glory, tilling the hard-packed clay with my little tiller, raking up the dead weed piles, and snipping off the last stubborn remnant bits with my clippers--I discovered what it was that I loved. 

My little plants. My favorite is this one that has tiny delicate petals when it is well watered and healthy.

I was so relieved to find a single little flower still growing on it as a sign that I hadn't killed it.

Since this experience last Saturday I've been thinking about some other stuff that I do because I want people to think well of me. And I wonder if blogging is one of those things. Or rather, I wonder if blogging could become one of those things for me, which is why it has taken me so dang long to start doing it. I signed up Carrie Grairdquist as a blogger over 2 years ago, and didn't start posting until a few months ago. As I write this, I still haven't let anyone read any of what I have written. And I think that part of the reason is pride. I am a professional technical writer--it is my job to write well and edit well and explain ideas well. So as a blogger I want to live up to that, and that feeling of pride has turned out to be a choke point. I have idea after idea after idea come to me that I want to write about, but it has been very difficult to actually write most of it, and even more difficult to publish a bit of it, and more difficult still to be brave enough to tell anyone how to find what I have published.

So the thing that I need to figure out is how to turn whatever these feelings are into some sort of feeling of love. Love for writing, love for what I'm writing about, and hope that someone or somebodies out there whom I love will want to read it. And I need to figure out how to trust that my readers (including my future self) won't care so much if there are a few weeds in the flower patch.