Weeds

     Around this time every summer I begin dreaming of crisp fall evenings, cider on the stove and logs crackling in the fireplace.  I begin to crave the predictability of the children going to school at a certain time and returning home at a certain time each day.  I long for the chill in the air and the anticipation of the most wonderful time of the year, which for me happens to be Halloween through Christmas.  Autumn has always been my favorite season.  My other reason for counting down the days until harvest time can be summed up in one word: weeds.  Weeding is at the top of my list of least favorite chores.  It is monotonous, back breaking, never ending, mind numbing fruitless labor.  I can weed one of my garden beds meticulously until not a single one of the heinous offenders remains and by the next evening, there is a whole new crop popping up.  Usually my back is still recovering from the hour of crouching the night before and I wait a few more days.  I have an elderly neighbor whom I love dearly and who happens to be a master gardener.  I'm pretty sure Cora could get a palm tree to grow in Antarctica.  She assures me that the best way to go about this whole weeding business is to do ten or fifteen minutes each morning and night.  Sounds simple enough.  Turns out it is not as simple as it sounds when you have three small children and an unrelenting schedule.  I began thinking about this as I was doing what else......weeding, the other day.  What ever happened to the "lazy days of summer"?  So far our summer has been so booked with vacations, play dates, fireworks and family activities that I haven't even had time to sit down and write a blog post for two weeks now.  Some days I have to literally remind myself to breathe.  I think this is a large part of the reason I am so nostalgic for fall and winter.  When the seasons change, we are forced to slow down just a bit.  People hunker down in their houses.  Children are actually ready to go to bed by eight o'clock because the sun has gone down.  Of course, the fall and winter are still full of plenty activities to take up our time.  At least, though, amid all of these activities, I am not trying to somehow steal away one precious hour a day to dig in the dirt.

     The one redeeming quality about weeding is that it is a good time to think.  There is really not much else to do while squatting and repeating the same mindless motion over and over.  As I was weeding my sunflower patch for the twentieth time this summer, I did some good thinking.  My thought process began with about 101 other things I would rather be doing at that moment. I think being abducted by aliens actually crossed my mind- that is how much I despise weeding.  Most of the thoughts that popped up, however, revolved around people from this planet, namely, my family.  We have been so frazzled and spread so thin this summer that I feel the need to become reacquainted with my husband.  My children have gone to bed without a story more times than I care to admit (pretty unheard of at our house- we try to read every night).  As I pondered on how out of control our summer had become, an analogy began to take root in my mind.  All of these activities that were taking so much time away from the people I love the most were like the weeds I was pulling.  The weeds, like the activities, had started out small; just a few here and there.  Before I knew it, the sunflower patch, like my schedule, had become overrun.  I guess the reason we weed (I am not a gardener, so please correct me if I'm wrong) is so that the weeds don't take all of the nutrients from the soil that are needed by the plants we are actually trying to grow.  It makes sense to me, that if a bed becomes overrun with weeds, there will be less space and less strength for other plants to thrive.  The sunflowers still seem to be thriving, but slowly, almost imperceptibly, weeds were creeping up and filling in ever closer to their massive stocks, stealing whatever light and water they could take.  Their is a particularly vicious vine that grows in our yard.  It attaches to whatever it touches.  It wraps around and chokes the life out of anything it can get it's leafy tentacles on.  I do not want to let the insignificant busyness of life choke the life blood out of my family.  

     I know there has to be a happy medium.  I enjoy spending time with my extended family, and I like letting my kids stay up until sunset and soak up the outdoors.  A little busyness is good.  It gives us something to look forward to and it makes us more grateful for the rare lazy moments that occasionally come along.  But I have realized that for the sake of keeping family relationships intact, I may need to do a little weeding in my life.  I may have to become a little more comfortable with the word "no".  I may have to realize that as nice as it is to become better acquainted with neighbors, we cannot possibly invite each one of them over for a backyard BBQ before summer's end.  I need to realize that it is ok to let my children spend a day just sitting in the sun eating a Popsicle or climbing the apple tree in the backyard.  I may need to lower my expectations about how much I was going to accomplish in the yard this summer.  Some weeds are beautiful when they start to grow.  Morning glory, for example, with it's graceful vines and delicate white flowers is lovely to look at.  It is not quite so lovely, however, when it has spent fifty years becoming permanently embedded in your lawn.  All of the activities we have participated in as a family this summer have been fun and worthwhile.  But I refuse to let this level of activity, this constant, unrelenting movement, embed itself in our family life.  Just as weeding in nature is a constant chore, I think I will always find the need for weeding and pruning within my life.  I need to remember what is at the heart of the activity jungle: a fledgling family, crying out for nourishment.  I think perhaps, one day a week, I will turn off my phone.  I will make exactly one plan for the day: to be with my family.  To just be.