Giving Notice

At my house, we have a clear division of yard-care labor. One of us is good at adding and growing plants, and the other is good at removing and cutting them back. I won’t name names. 

Naturally, this leads to occasional conflict, when, say, the grower discovers that the cutter has mowed the “grass” that was actually liatris, a pollinator-friendly perennial pushing up from corms planted many months earlier.  

This goes both ways, of course. Sometimes the cutter needs to hack back the overgrowth of even desirable things to give the whole plant the proper amount of sun or spacing. But if our patience runs thin or the daylight grows short, these opposing efforts cast long shadows, with one personality pushing toward possibility (or, uncharitably, “Chaos”), while the other strains to contain things (futilely desiring control). I’m paraphrasing more colorful language here. 

[Deep breath.] 

But, I also recognize that this intimate balance is an opportunity to set aside “right” and “wrong” (or often, “I told you!”) and instead be mindful that our yard-keeping is actually about giving good notice—literally telling each other what we’re seeing, instead of assuming we’re monitoring the same things. It’s an admirable skill, for example, to recognize plants just as they emerge, looking nothing like the showy stems we’ll later take photos of and send to our gardener friends. It’s also valuable to prune things so they grow into their most bountiful future shape.  

So, I can’t promise Eden. I might only notice resentment a little sooner, as when I catch myself snooping around the landscaping, looking for shorn little sprouts. (Well, there you go. Cover blown.) 

Maybe I can make a walking meditation of touring the yard, pointing out what’s changed and grown each week. And maybe my counterpart will explain what kind of signage I need to be using to stop the whir of the weed-whacker before it’s too late. I might never adhere to straight lines or uniform spacing, but I can better communicate what’s where and why. And when I see that a certain mower has forged a path where I didn’t prefer one, may I have gratitude for the path and less fixation on its placement. Amen.