Letting It Go

So, remember when I said it was the garden's year? Apparently, it was only the garden's three months. This is what I pulled out of my garden, front and back flower beds today. And guess what? This isn't even all of it! There's still more that I was way too lazy to pull out. It's going to be waiting for me, patiently, until I get some more caffeine in my body and a nice back rub. I have really let my yard go.

And why, you may ask, am I sharing this small bit of embarrassment with you? I could have just as easily gone the whole rest of my life and not shared this information with the world wide web. It's because I wanted you to know the truth. The truth is, gardening starts out easy in the spring. The ground is soft from all the melted snow and spring rains. You baby the seeds you've planted, hoping every day for some bit of growth you can chart. It's pure success, I tell you, this gardening in the spring. But then, things change. Day trips are planned. You go out of town for a weekend. The plants are big enough to skip a day of watering, so you let it go for a day. Then there are a string of 100+ degree days and you think, if I have to go outside for one minute longer than I have to my eyelashes will melt off. You get caught up in the rush of school preparations, and you attempt to potty-train the world's most stubborn toddler. The plants patiently wait for you. They are silently calling, "Hey, could you take care of these weeds? They're really cramping my style. You won't have any pumpkins for Halloween if you keep this up."

Then, when you finally get up the gumption to go out and tackle that yard, you say to yourself, "You know, this garbage can wouldn't be so full if I had weeded last month before the weeds grew as tall as my husband." But there were so many good reasons to put it off. The zoo. The dinosaurs. The pool. The McDonald's. It is a classic lesson we see so many times in life, isn't it? We wish we had done the job when it was small, but we lie to ourselves as to why we didn't do it, like we are important diplomats with uber-important schedules that can't possibly be altered. As I was doing manual labor today, I thought that my head hadn't been this clear in a long time. My head is cluttered with big thoughts and creative yarns strewn on its floor like my messy craft room. Doing something that is simple and easy that still requires effort is sometimes the only cure for a foggy brain. And, my own bit of advice? Make sure you do it the day after the garbage man comes, so you have room for all of your lazy excuses to be thrown away. There are some things its okay to just let go.