Vacation
Our garden is looking spectacular this year. I’d like to take credit for it, but this year, it’s really been a family affair. Forrest has been out there working just about every sunny moment and with our girls getting older, even they enjoy the odd bit of weeding here and there. It doesn’t hurt that we’ve learned what plants are happy in our garden (potatoes! onions! lettuce!) and which ones don’t enjoy the unique northwest mix of long days and short summers (watermelons…)
But we’re leaving in a few days and although Forrest has been working overtime to implement our watering system, I’m not sure what we’ll be returning to. Forrest and the twins will only be gone for two weeks but there’s an even chance we’ll return to either a desiccated front yard of dead plants or an overgrown jungle of weeds. Last time we went back east, we arrived home to a gorgeously happy garden that was ready to harvest. I’m crossing my fingers we’ll have the same luck this time.
Last night I went outside looking for my eldest to let her know that dinner was ready. I called her name a few times, but I couldn’t see her until she called back. She was hidden in between our two rows of raspberry canes, picking and eating her fill. It was just the right temperature and the sun was setting behind us, casting an orange glow over our whole neighborhood.
“I don’t know why I keep planning trips for the summer when it’s so pretty here,” I said.
She shrugged, knowing the answer as well as I do. School. It’s too hard in these older grades to make up the work, and there aren’t long breaks in the rainy winter, at least not long enough to justify the expense.
“It’ll be hard to leave,” I continued. I’m at the stage of travel planning where I wonder why I ever decided to go anywhere in the first place, why I ever thought it was worth the packing and stress.
“Yeah. But we’ll be happy there too, I think. It’ll be an adventure at least,” she said grimly.
I’m still chuckling at her tone. For people like her and me, “adventure” doesn’t have the positive connotations it should. We like things to stay the way they are, for life to be pretty much the same tomorrow as it was yesterday. I used to have wanderlust, maybe. But now we’ve built a little oasis and I like my little family and traveling with kids is hard and what if everything goes wrong?
At least with a garden you know where you stand. Not much can go wrong. Well, a lot can go wrong but it doesn’t really matter in the end. Maybe that’s why we should travel, her and I. Because it’s a little too easy to forget that whether or not the garden grows isn’t exactly life or death. It’s a little too peaceful, a little too pleasant, a little too comfortable. And I forget that I know exactly how to deal with everything going wrong. So we’ll head out, across the world, and Forrest will anxiously check his bluetooth enabled watering system timer and I’ll do my best to take deep breaths and when we return from our adventure, I guess we’ll see what’s changed. Both in the garden and in ourselves.
