Field of Daydreams

The way my husband does yard work and the way I do yard work couldn't be more different.

He is very goal oriented in his approach to maintaining our yard.

I am not.

I’m easily distracted. For me, yard work is about the adventure, finding small treasures. It is about being out in nature on a peaceful Sunday afternoon with no headphones and no conversations, allowing my mind to go wherever it pleases.

But it is Father’s Day, and he has chosen for his day that we would together, as a couple, do yard work. So outside I go.

Brooms and Mandalas

My first task is sweeping our back patio.

I become fascinated by the shadow pattern of our patio table on the pave stones. I spend some moments sweeping the hair-looking tree droppings in different patterns such that they interact with the intricate shadows.

I reflect on people who make ice sculptures they know will eventually melt away, and monks in Tibet spending hours creating intricate mandalas using colored sand only to then blow them away.

After some moments of making my catkins art (I looked it up and that’s what those hair-like tree droppings are called) I sweep them into the trash container.

Pressed

I move on to working on the yard.

Our yard is wild and wooly, owing to the fact that we do not—likely much to the chagrin of our neighbors—use any chemical controls or enhancements. Our yard is natural.

I find a lone little purple flower, some sort of weed I guess, blooming alongside our front stoop and snap it at its stem it in order to press and dry it. I pass my husband and his new lawn mower in the driveway on my way to the back porch. There I have a sophisticated plant-drying station that I will use to save the wee flower. I remember I have some plants already drying that I had put under weight last month.

They’re now ready to come out!

I spend quite some time marveling at them: how some of them have maintained their coloring…their interesting folds and creases from spending weeks squished between the pages of fat books weighted by a cinder block... I begin to plan how I might incorporate the pressed and dried botanicals into collage and card-making and gel printing.

I remember I was right in the middle of picking up sticks in the front yard so that my husband can mow. I head back outside.

Sophie’s Rest

He has picked up the sticks and already started to mow by the time I get back out.

So I head to the backyard to clear some leaves from an overgrown area near our back fence. The metal prongs of my rake scrape something hard in the ground. Setting the rake aside, I unearth what I think is a large rock.

I find it is an engraved stone grave marker.

Reading it, momentarily I’m alarmed. But then I clear away enough soil to see the paw print and conclude I’ve uncovered the final resting place for someone’s family pet. I spend many moments thinking about the previous owners who so loved Sophie. I think about Sophie’s brief but apparently impactful life. I wonder what kind of container she was buried in and if, were I to dig further, she’d still be recognizable or had long since decomposed.

I think about my initial reaction and reflect on the phenomenon of people naming their pets “human” names. I feel very glad that the paw print was included on the grave marker or else I might have drawn a very different conclusion about the people who once inhabited the space I currently do.

Excited, I show my husband the marker. He pauses the lawnmower and tells me there is an area near the garage doors where I can put it to be carted away by the junk collector he has arranged. Appalled, I say I intend to keep the marker.

He goes back to his lawnmowering.

Charlotte’s Web

Sadly, our old charcoal grill—a Mother’s Day gift to me 10 years or so ago from my kids—is now in the to-be-picked-up-by-the-junk-man staging area by the garage doors. When I was dealing with the gravestone, my husband must have put it there.

I go to uncover the tarp on it just to make sure it is truly too rusted out to salvage. I’m thinking maybe restoring it would make a cool project for me.

Then I see that a spider has built her home in the tarp covering the grill.

I think about how most spider webs I’ve seen in real life do not look like the idealized, perfectly symetrical webs in cartoons. I wonder why this spider would build her web on such a precarious foundation—the fabric tarp instead of, say, the more solid metal legs of the grill itself. Then I think about how her species has been around much longer than mine has, and if she built her home using the tarp for supports rather than the legs, she likely has very good, evolutionary-tested reasons for doing so.

I leave the tarp (and the web) be.

Yard Quest

My husband is wheeling the lawn mower back into the garage, his self-assigned yard tasks for his Father’s Day now complete.

I proudly show him the sweat on my brow from what scant yard work I have accomplished in the same time frame that he has unboxed and prepared the mower, cleared sticks and rubble, mowed both the front and back yards. He makes the joke he frequently does about my ancestors and his ancestors and the house/field divide that he imagines must have characterized their existence in servitude.

I laugh. I ask him to start the leaf blower for me so I can finish my self-assigned yard tasks. I feel rugged and strong and indestructible as he hands me the hot, hefty, loudly growling tool. I feel like I am some sort of warrior who has just been given a mystical weapon in order to vanquish a great enemy in battle.

I look up to tell my husband I’ll be finished in just a few minutes but he has already gone inside the house to warm up dinner.