Practically speaking this means on those rare occasions when there are a few extra dollars in the bank account, Beth thinks about redecorating the family room and I think tuck-pointing. She has visions of freshly painted walls and new furniture and I imagine new gutters. Since we live in a home that is just about 60-years-old, maintenance gets a far disproportionate amount of our budget. When we moved into the house seven years ago, we proclaimed that our pink tiled bathroom would not last six months before we started to remodel. But then the basement flooded. A new kitchen was in the five year plan but in the past five years we have had to replace rotting windows, a sinking garage floor and oh yeah, we've adopted twice. So we continue to live with the peach laminate counter top in the kitchen and Pepto-Bismol pink tile in one of the bathrooms.
It's frustrating to be in charge of aesthetics in our home--except for one time a year. Each Spring when it is time to plant, Beth gets to decide what will look best and I am in charge of digging the holes. Most years we have ten yards of fresh mulch delivered and I dutifully fill wheelbarrow after wheelbarrow and disperse mulch around the yard until the large, pungent mound on the driveway disappears.
One Fall Beth decided that our house would be absolutely resplendent if only we had hundreds and hundreds of tulips. She poured over bulb catalogs to select the most hearty and beautiful combinations. She spent all of her birthday money and what felt like the budget of a small country to purchase tulip bulbs. We purchased the bulb planting attachment for the cordless drill and I measured the ideal depth to plant tulip bulbs. We spent a weekend planting cluster after cluster of bulbs.
All winter we had visions of welcoming Spring with a yard that fooled our neighbors into thinking they had made a wrong turn and were instead visiting Holland. Hundreds and hundreds of tulips would signal that we had survived another harsh Illinois winter and our endurance would be rewarded with tulips.
Come Spring, one lonely and not particularly hearty tulip emerged from the ground. One. Before our solitary tulip was fully opened, a violent Spring thunderstorm stripped the petals from the flower and we were left with a stem. All of our work, all of our money, all of our hope and we were left with a stem. Surprisingly Beth did not appreciate my comment about how we would have been better off to place a stack of $20 dollar bills on the roof of the car and drive around the neighborhood. We haven't planted tulips since. They remain Beth's favorite flower and now she enjoys the ones I have a florist deliver to her early each Spring.
The thing I love about maintenance projects is my deeply held belief that if I care for things, if I properly maintain and clean and tune up, the things will respond as I expect. I have our furnace serviced and it is ready to fire up on that first chilly Fall morning. I take the lawnmower in for a tune up and it is at the ready for the first cut of the season. My gutters move the water away from the house and I do not have to fret about a wet basement. This is a world that makes sense. Hundred of dollars and hours of effort spent on tulips that do not emerge in the Spring does not make sense to me.
We've discovered that our puppy, Eleanor, is about 50 percent less crazy if we take her on walks several times per day. Since there is a direct correlation between calmness in our home and puppy walks, I'm a pretty willing participant. Most mornings during the week Eleanor and I set off on a tour around our neighborhood. While I wouldn't readily admit that I'm enjoying my mornings with the puppy, I have enjoyed seeing the neighborhood come to life. First there were tiny flowers peeking through the snow then the buds began to develop on the trees and soon there were green stems and leaves poking through black dirt and shooting straight toward the sky. But they weren't tulips.
This Spring I have become acquainted with daffodils. I'm sure these daffodils have been in place for years but I've not noticed them before. I guess you tend to notice things when you're walking instead of driving a mini-van from one drop off to the next pick up. These flowers have survived and seemingly thrived in the midwestern yo-yo temperatures. Eighty degrees one day, forty degrees the next? No problem. Daffodil flowers remain intact. Blustery wind, driving rain? The daffodils stand in defiance.
There is an empty lot a couple of streets away from us. A developer razed the house on that land in hopes of building a larger and more modern home. The bulldozer engine was still warm when the bottom dropped out of the housing market. So the corner lot has been empty for a couple of years. This year, during my walks, I noticed daffodils popping up around the outline of where the house once stood.
This makes no sense. No one fertilized. No one measured the exact depth of the bulbs. In fact, bulldozers broke up chunks of cement and leveled the ground on top of where these daffodils bulbs had been resting. But this Spring the daffodils paid no mind to what made sense and they emerged once more. Sturdy, defiant, lovely.
There seems to be all sorts of daffodil lessons for me. Years ago someone planted daffodils. The investment they made continues to pay off even though their house is no longer standing. I think this is the definition of legacy. There is a passage in the Bible that describes the lilies in the field and how they pay no attention to what they will wear and yet they are the definition of beauty. Maybe this means I shouldn't worry. However the lesson that seems to be rattling around my head these days is that sometimes things don't make sense.
I am a mom who is doing her best to nurture my children into amazing adults. Sometimes my hard work and planning and maintenance pays off and sometimes it doesn't--at least not in ways that I can see right now. Sometimes things emerge because of my efforts and sometimes it is in spite of my efforts. Sometimes things that don't make a bit of sense are a gift. And sometimes you need an early morning walk with a crazy pup to see these gifts.
2 comments:
Simply stated, beautiful.
sometimes you need to embrace the crazy tiled bathroom and turn it into a fun hawaii theme.
thanks for another great post!
and p.s. i planted a small country's budget worth of tulips, and the squirrels that dug up every one of them and stuffed them in their cheeks didn't even thank me. i sympathize.
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