Marketing Books and Marketing Myself

For all the writing I do about plants, kids, and the weather, you would be forgiven for forgetting that most of my work time is spent writing books. Honestly, some weeks, I try to forget it too. But, after nearly two years of hard work, my next book is in its final stages! Which means, to be honest, all the parts I don’t really love. I’ve got to go through the final proofreading changes, making sure that all the em dashes are en dashes (or is it the other way around?). Then I’ve got to put my cover ideas down on the digital page and get a completed image for publishing. And then there’s the marketing.

The book has a planned release date of January 10th, so I need to start promoting it pretty much now. Which I suppose is what I’m doing here, but to be honest, I think of this blog and its readers as friends and family, so it’s not quite the same. And by not quite the same, I mean not nearly as nerve-wracking. It’s the difference between talking to a bunch of people at family BBQ and giving a speech to a crowd of people.

I used to be good at this stuff, I think. Back when I worked full-time, I used to ask people for money all the time. I was in nonprofit fundraising so I wasn’t even trying to sell them anything. Even in my volunteer work, I don’t really mind asking people to give. But when I’m selling a product, specifically a creative work I’ve put my heart into, it gets a lot harder.

I suppose the hard part comes in because I feel like I’m selling myself, in part. I mean, not really, because my writing and my self are two very different things. For one thing, I think about my writing a lot more so it’s usually more measured, witty, and cohesive. The flip side of that is that my writing is out there, unchangeable, forever. Once it’s published, there are no more redo’s. If I go back later and don’t like something, welp, I guess I can just try not to do it again next time.

It’s not that I’m not proud of my work. I’m so proud of it. This will be the fourth book I’ve written (and the third I’ve gotten all the way to publishing). Bringing a book from a blank page to a hard copy is a tremendous undertaking. And even if it’s not perfect, even if I go back in a decade and see those flaws, the accomplishment remains.

But marketing it is a completely different skill set. One that I don’t have. Not yet, anyway. I haven’t done a ton of promo for my other books, but there’s a part of me that thinks it’s time. Time to talk about my work. Time to talk about why I think these books are worth reading. Time to ask people if they can spare time and a few bucks to check it out.

So, for you guys, I guess this is my way of saying that over the next few months, you might see a few more posts about my books and a few fewer (can you tell I’m a writer?) posts about gardening. If it’s clunkily done or boring, please, give me grace. It’s just one more thing in the long list of hard things I’ve decided to learn how to do. And as the saying goes, if you want to be good at something, you have to be willing to be bad at it first.

The Last Cucumber

I’m certain I’ve posted on here about cucumbers before, if only because they are my family’s absolute favorite garden produce. There are some plants that aren’t made much better by being grown in the garden - storebought is just as good in my opinion. But there are some that really benefit from that extra burst of freshness. Cucumbers are the epitome of those.

It’s funny, the little family rituals that develop over time. Every year, when the first cucumber is ready to be eaten, whoever finds it runs into the house, inevitably cheering for the long awaited harvest, and cuts it into five pieces, which are distributed to the rest of us. It’s nothing formal, just what happens. The idea of keeping that first cucumber for yourself, of selfishly eating it alone, is almost unthinkable. And so, this small harvest ritual is re-created every year, without fail.

What we don’t have is a ritual for the last cucumber. Perhaps we should somehow memorialize the end of the growing season and the return to the storebought. Instead, in the hustle and bustle of fall sports and school, Forrest usually decides enough is enough and rips out the yellowing vines, pulling off whatever cucumbers are still hanging on. They’re always tiny, usually unripe, and far too bitter - the fruit that came too late, in unwelcoming conditions, just trying to grow some seeds before the frosts come.

Right now those last few cucumbers are sitting on the table in front of me. We’ll munch on them, but I doubt anyone will notice when the last one’s gone. I wouldn’t at all be surprised if it actually ends up in the compost after being ignored for days.

We don’t have a lot of “ending” rituals around here. Everyone puts up the Christmas tree together. I take it down alone. The first day of school is full of hoopla. The last day is celebrated with take-out on the couch. Even New Year’s is more about welcoming the new year than saying goodbye to the last one.

I didn’t grow up in a culture that had a particular harvest festival. We had Halloween, of course, but that was about candy and pranks and costumes. Even when we did the pumpkin patch thing, that wasn’t about the end of the harvest, not for me, anyway. I guess I always believed Harvest Festivals were like carnivals - full of delicious food, frivolity and family. But I think the old festivals must have also been about loss. The loss of light as days grow shorter. The loss of space as life moves indoors. The loss of variety as cuisine moves towards easily stored foods.

All of that food and frivolity takes on a different meaning then, doesn’t it. It becomes about enjoying that which does not last. About making sure that the last cucumber is cherished because the next one is months away. About appreciating what we have while we have it, secure in the knowledge that it will come around again.

This probably sounds made up, but while I was writing this, Forrest has been munching on those cucumbers right in front of me. No joke, somewhere in the last hour, that last cucumber disappeared. Perhaps next year I’ll hold on to it, carefully cutting it into five pieces. Perhaps next year, I’ll remember to celebrate the end just as meaningfully as we celebrated the beginning.

Serious Work and Committing to Play

I’ve been thinking lately about the value of play. Somewhere over the last decade, between pandemics and tweenagers and writing books, my life has grown a bit too…serious. Not in a bad way, really. But there are so many things to be done each day. Many of the tasks in my life have to be done right the first time, every time. That might sound overdramatic, but when the health of your child depends on doing a division problem in your head at 5:45 am, it pays to take things seriously.

Somewhere along the way, though, that very real sense of life or death started to bleed into everything else. I don’t regret that. Those other things - my books, my kids’ schooling, my friendships - they’re important and worth thoughtful consideration. But they’re not life or death, and, more importantly, they’re not made better by making them high stakes.

When it comes to injecting my kids with insulin, that extra jolt of stress is quite important. I need to be on my game. I need to be aware of a lot of factors - so many that I actually can’t list them all out here. Many of those little calculations are so ingrained that I forget I’m making them. It’s only when I talk to another parent of a Type 1 kid that I remember how much I’m doing.

Sometimes people who don’t know what it’s like see my seriousness and tell me I need to take a break, to relax a little. And to be honest, nothing makes me feel less seen or understood. It’s, frankly, infuriating. This isn’t just my anxiety talking - other Type 1 caregivers will tell you the same thing. This vigilance is the difference between my child being healthy, having a seizure, or dying 15 years earlier due to health complications.

So I suppose it makes sense that moving into play is a little harder for me than it once was. Maybe not harder. It just takes more commitment. I have to choose to embrace the joy that I feel. I have to choose to lean into the cringiness of being unabashedly happy. And the hardest part is, I have to do this while I work.

There are a lot of parts of writing books that are not creative - editing and formatting and researching and hours and hours of proofreading. They need a critical eye. A brain that says, “Nope, that’s wrong.” The main part, however, the big part, requires something completely different. That voice saying “That’s wrong,” as true as it might be, is quickest way to stop a good writing day in its tracks. There can be iterative work, building and changing and rebuilding again, but “wrong” has no part of it.

It reminds me of when my girls were little and would engage in these elaborate, hours long pretend play sessions. They would pull out the dress-up bin or the legos and create whole worlds and intricate storylines. But it wasn’t like a real story that starts at the beginning and smoothly flows to the end. There was a lot of, “Wait, no, I want them to be sisters,” and “How ‘bout instead of it being regular, it’s actually winter and they’re cold.” And then there would be arguments and negotiations and either they would come to an agreement or the game would end.

That’s a little bit of what writing is like for me. Play. Complicated, elaborate, sometimes frustrating play. In order to do that, I have to turn off a part of my grown-up brain. I still need the parts that can plan, and empathize, and incorporate historical events. But I really, really need to get rid of the serious part. Like a parent who joins their child’s game just to try and direct it, that part takes what could be really interesting and makes it mundane…boring…conventional.

It’s hard, sometimes, to shut off that serious self. Quieting that part of myself is also what I love about writing. I get to, if only for a few hours, discard my negative self-talk. And at the end, whether what I wrote is good or bad, I know that I was able to achieve something rare and fleeting in my serious life. I was able to remember how to play.

Pajamas and Productivity

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about the difference between how things appear and how they truly are. To be more specific, I’ve been thinking about situations where the way things appear is the complete opposite of the reality. For example, in our neck of the woods, there is a lot of luxury spending. We’re not, like, in private jet territory, but it’s really not uncommon to see people driving cars that cost over a hundred thousand dollars. A lot of people own speedboats or small yachts. And there is an ongoing problem for my kids because they only have android phones and the majority of their friends have iPhones which don’t have compatible group chats.

Forrest and I have tried to pass down our values about money to our children, something that has not always been easy. So when our kids say, “Wow, they have such a fancy car! They must have a lot of money!”, one of our go-to lines is, “No, they had a lot of money. Now they have that car.” The idea that luxury purchases indicate spending, not wealth, is one of those things where appearance and reality are at odds.

The reason this is on my mind right now is because it is ten a.m. and I am still in my pajamas. The appearance is that I’m having a lazy morning, relaxing and resting. The reality is that I’ve been awake for four and a half hours and haven’t taken a moment to change, let alone wash my hair. If I had taken the time to get dressed, clean the kitchen of the breakfast mess, and generally organize my life, I can promise you, I would have used up all my motivation long before I got to the writing part of my day.

I’ve spent a lot of time over the last year figuring out which tasks were essential and important, and which I could leave off my to-do list. There were a lot of things that I was once told were important that turned out not to matter. In fact, the only reason I was doing them was to escape judgment from other people who, for one reason or another, considered those jobs necessary.

I don’t need to go through all the nitty gritty details, but suffice it to say that my schedule is clearer than it’s been in a long time. I’ve probably become a nightmare neighbor, what with replacing my sedate flower beds with an abundantly intensive cottage garden. I’ve stopped responding to texts the moment they come in and my blog doesn’t get updated as often as maybe it should…

But I’ve written more in the last three months than I did in the year before that. I’ve spent countless hours on the phone or having coffee with those friends, really talking to them. And those unruly flower beds don’t need watering or weeding any more, since planting native plants means they thrive without any input from me.

So, while on the outside it looks like I’m withdrawing and stagnating, the reality is quite the opposite. I wonder how often that is true for the people I meet. Especially in our hustle culture, we judge people for their output. How much content did you produce? How much in sales did you bring in? How many lines of code did you write? But maybe that person’s productivity is down because they’re learning a new skill, or healing from an injury, or spending time nurturing a child.

But when we only reward appearance, we get what we pay for - less learning, less healing, less nurturing. So, I guess in the end, the real question is, which is more important to us?

Basil

I came here today to write about having too many tomatoes, but I looked back a year and alas! I’ve already written that post. I suppose the feeling of overabundance is somewhat seasonal. For what it’s worth, I do have too many tomatoes and not enough time or storage space. But I suppose I’ll have to write about basil instead.

Right now we have a lot of fresh basil still hanging on despite nighttime temperatures dropping. And if you know me personally, you know that a fresh mozzarella, tomato, and basil salad is one of my favorite meals. Not just mine either, apparently. I woke up this morning to a cutting board with some extra basil leaves on it. I was puzzled for a moment until I realized my eldest made her lunch late last night, after I was already asleep. Which means she ventured out sometime after eleven o’clock to get some fresh basil for her Friday lunch.

Something about that made me smile, even at six a.m. I love the idea that my kids feel both ownership and accessibility to the plants we grow. Every time we walk to our car, one or another kid is grabbing a handful of mint or sage to eat on the car ride. When cucumbers are in season, they’ll often grab one out of the garden on the way home from the bus. And my kids, my husband, and even my dog are notorious for eating the kale that grows on our property like a weed.

If that sounds idyllic, please understand: the presence of the garden doesn’t really change much about their general behavior. We still fight about screen time and chores and homework. They still bicker about sharing a room and who left a puddle of water on the bathroom floor after their shower. And for the rainy season, our yard may as well not exist to my kids.

We don’t have a garden out of some grand desire to give our kids a cultivated childhood. We have a garden for the exact opposite reason. Forrest hated mowing the useless front yard and I was looking for something (anything) that I could do to get a break from parenting while still being present enough to be technically home. It was almost a bonus that the kids didn’t really enjoy it and didn’t spend much time out there. If that sounds unfeeling and unkind, well, I encourage you to spend five days a week alone with three kids under five. A quiet refuge can be worth more than gold.

I’m realizing I’m supposed to be talking about basil here. My point is, I’m only now realizing that I view it as a privilege to have access to garden-fresh produce in my front yard. But to my kids, that’s just life. “It’s time to make lunch, and oh yeah, there’s basil outside, let me go grab some.” Every once in a while, I wonder if I should make them aware of their good fortune.

Then I decide not to.

I want them to grow up thinking this is normal. Thinking that fresh basil and too many tomatoes and kale everywhere is just what life looks like. So much of our world seems to revolve around the idea that there isn’t enough, so we’ve got to put ourselves first, and screw everyone else. Maybe, just maybe, this overabundance will show them the truth. That if we plant the seeds and tend our gardens, there will always be enough. More than enough.

Watercolors and Making It Look Easy

This summer, while on a transatlantic cruise, my eldest asked to join in on a few watercolor classes on the ship. I wasn’t going to say no to her and I found myself doing my best to keep up with her. It’s not that I don’t enjoy art - I do. It’s just that watercolors aren’t a medium I’m particularly familiar with. There’s just something about the way you need to move your wrist, the process of mixing colors, the creation of shadows and shading - I don’t really get it.

All three of my daughters far outpace my artistic ability. It helps that they have each other, and when their screen time runs out for the day, I can often find them sitting together, chatting and drawing. Most of what they draw these days are cartoonish characters, something I might not look twice at. But having seen them practice and improve and iterate, I know there’s a lot more there than meets the eye.

Before I saw the three of them at work, I might have believed that artistic skill was innate, inherent, inborn. And yes, maybe it is to some extent. But as I watch my kids attack new skills with openness and resilience, I realize that maybe a lot of us were sold a bill of goods. We were told were (or weren’t) good artists, good singers, good athletes, or good students. We were ranked and placed and then given attention if we showed immediate aptitude or ignored if we didn’t.

It feels different with my kids. Not in the way where everyone gets a trophy, but in the way where they’re taught that it’s ok to be bad at things. That you don’t have to know everything. That learning a skill means spending time as a beginner - messing up, cleaning up that mess, and starting over. These lessons are taught in school, right alongside math facts and vocabulary.

Sometimes I’m sure their teachers wonder if those messages are actually being heard, actually making a difference. Maybe they are, maybe they aren’t. My kids are particularly stubborn, especially when they feel like they’re not good at something. But it feels different now. Like kids these days are more likely to look at some frustration, some annoying moment in the learning process, and nod. “Yup, this is just a part of life. It’s supposed to feel this way.”

When I was their age, I felt like I had to seem to have it all together. We all did. We had to pretend that we were totally fine, everything was great, and when we did achieve something, it was because we somehow paradoxically had worked hard and were naturally good at it. Something about having it all and making it look easy.

I don’t want that for my kids. Heck, I don’t want it for me. I long ago gave up on the having it all and my hope for them is that they don’t feel like they need to make it look easy. If it’s hard, let it look hard. Life can be hard. Goodness knows middle school is hard. The last thing I want them wasting time on is making it look easy.

I think that’s true for middle age too. There are parts of my life that flow beautifully - friendships that are simple and uncomplicated, skills that I’ve been honing for two decades now. But there are so many parts that are changing - everything from parenting a teenager to dealing with a body that isn’t always up to snuff. And I’m so happy that I have good role models to teach me how to learn to do the hard stuff. Who are always there to remind me, “Yup, this is just a part of life. It’s supposed to feel this way.”

Harvest

Harvest is upon us. These days, every time we go somewhere or someone comes here, someone in the Dillaway clan makes sure to grab a couple zucchinis or cucumbers to deliver, too. A friend, upon receipt of a truly gargantuan zucchini, said, “You grew this?” And my only reply was, “We grew thirty of those.” And there are more coming.

We’ve already frozen fourteen cups of shredded zucchini, another ten of diced, and I plan on doing the same with stewed tomatoes this week. I don’t feel up to canning, so our freezer is getting the brunt of it, so much so that I found myself searching, “Deep Freezer Organization Ideas” this morning. When I measured the potatoes, I realized we’d gotten a bushel and a peck, which has of course been stuck in my head ever since.

The funny thing about it is that, at least around here, the plants that give the most are often the ones that demand the least. Beyond watering and the occasional weeding, potatoes and onions are pretty happy. The tomatoes demand a little bit of babying at first, but not much more. The pumpkins, which are happily ripening, have needed no encouragement at all to take over both the front and the back yard. As for the zuchinnis? I’ve actively considered killing them after a few weeks of chopping and shredding, so I can promise you they’re not getting any special treatment.

The plants that get babied are the ones that, to be honest, are not all that impressive. Forrest loves growing peppers, so for months we nurtured little plants under our grow lights, long after everything else went outside to brave the elements. He carefully planted them, ensuring not to disturb their roots in the transfer. And so far we’ve gotten three mini peppers.

Compare that with my eldest and I playing “potato toss.” We dug four-inch-deep holes in the garden bed, stood at one end and earned points by successfully landing the seed potatoes in the holes. Halfway through, Forrest asked, “Shouldn’t you be making sure the eyes are facing upward?” Well, we got a bushel and a peck, so I guess we didn’t need to make sure after all.

I love the economy of the harvest. It’s so ridiculous. Extravagant. Extra. You give a plant the least bit of attention and all of a sudden you’re pulling up onions the size of a softball. There’s a lot more to it, I know, but so much of that happens long before anything comes up out of the ground. So much of the work is composting and starting seeds and planning for the weather which all happens long before the frosts end and the spring sunshine returns.

I long to be ridiculous. Extravagant. Extra. To return kindness with abundance. And on my darkest days, I find myself returning to the garden to remind myself not to overthink it. The key to a good harvest is in the preparation. Maybe if I put in the work to keep growing, keep exploring, keep challenging myself - maybe if I do that when the days are too short and the nights too long - when the sun comes out again, I, too, can create a harvest worth waiting for.

Travels and Tempests

It’s supposed to be 90 degrees today, which is probably the hottest it will get all year. Two days after school starts, of course. This feels like the summer that never quite got started. It rained on and off, which NEVER happens in July and August, and in between spells of warmer weather there were a lot of cool days. Our family also travelled a good bit, enjoying our adventures but missing out on that sense of long, lazy summer days. And now they’re back at school and I have time again - to write, to think, to breathe.

And as I’ve been doing that thinking, I’ve realized that last spring, I had two goals for my summer. Unspoken goals, mostly unarticulated even to myself, but they were there. The first was to survive our travel. I was plagues much of last year with health issues that spike when I’m stressed and they’re severe enough to derail the kind of international travel we were planning on. Forrest and I had lots of conversations about how to do travel differently, how to learn a better way. This mirrored the changes we were making more generally and he, like always, has been supportive of doing less, but doing it better. Less boxes checked off the list, more beautiful moments. Less frantic planning and waiting in lines, more walking around and seeing where the world takes us.

And I’m proud to say we did all that. The list of what we didn’t see in the UK is long. But we did see the people we love, we shared laughter over meals, and made memories that the girls will never forget. It’s still hard to watch the Instagram reels of other people and know that our photos don’t match up and the reason they don’t is because of me. But I wanted to get through it and that meant doing things differently, so if the perfect social media picture is what had to go, so be it.

The second goal, again unspoken, was to cocoon my kids in a bit of a bubble for the summer. That might sound weird, given the whole last paragraph about travel. It might sound overindulgent, but this was a different kind of cocoon. I wanted to give them space away. Away from what, I wasn’t even fully sure. But away. Away from the popularity games of middle school. Away from having to be so connected to everything all the time. Away from the enforced perfectionism that our culture places atop teen girls like a too-heavy crown.

I wanted to give them a summer where they could sleep in and forget to shower and decide to make pancakes for breakfast at noon. I wanted to give them a summer with quiet afternoons where we could talk, really talk, about how they are just starting to feel the pressure from the impossible demands of a culture who wants to tell women they have to be all things to all people at all times. Because I saw a change last year, especially in my younger two. Those messages were starting to creep in and their still-childish brains weren’t quite ready to handle them.

It all seemed to come to a head on a car ride to go get new shoes for school. One of them, I’m not sure who, had brought home-made cookies over to a friend’s house and the friend had talked about how those would make the two of them fat. My daughter was sad but mostly confused. Her friend had eaten cookies before. There had never been any comments. What was going on?

I asked my usual question. “Do you want the mom answer or the Serenity answer?” The mom answer is usually kind, measured and sprinkled with a liberal dose of language from parenting books and psychology classes. The Serenity answer is perhaps less kind but more true, usually looking past the question asked to why the person is asking that question and what’s maybe going on underneath.

They all wanted the Serenity answer. So we talked about how uncertain it is to be an adolescent with body and brain constantly changing. How when things are uncertain we look for any port in a storm. And how there are people who make their living off of keeping women on shaky foundations. Because if we stay uncertain, trying to live up to standards of appearance and behavior that are constantly changing, and conflicting, well, then, their affordably priced product (diet plan/makeup/home organization system/dating app) might seem like the perfect port in the storm. And we talked about how we’ve all done it. How many times each of us thought the haircut or daily planner would get everything back in order.

I don’t know how much of it sank in, but my girls definitely left for school a little more sturdy. They seemed more steady and less wind-tossed. To keep the maritime metaphor going, after a summer at harbor, they’re a bit more even-keeled and not searching so hard for any port in a storm, but rather maybe a little bit more ready to face what tempests will inevitably arise.

As for me? I’m exhausted. I did a deep breathing exercise this morning and woke up 45 minutes later after falling asleep. But that’s ok. Now that summer’s over, I’ve got all the time in the world.

Thunderstorms and Trees

We had a terrible storm here last weekend - lightning, power outages, and downed trees all over the place. It’s unusual for us to have summer storms, so unusual that on the news they were harkening to back to our last summer thunderstorm…in 2019. So we all crossed our fingers and hoped that the weather would put on a good show, but not too good of a show.

And it did! We were in the middle of movie night when the lightning show started and we made it through the night without our power going out, which was ideal and not true for many of our neighbors. My girls were worried about our many pets but at first it didn’t seem like they were phased. They slept on happily.

Until the movie ended. It seemed they thought the thunder was just another part of the soundtrack. But once the TV was off, their ears perked up and they realized it wasn’t just movie night. We spent the evening snuggling them and eventually the storm abated.

But it got me thinking. What storms in my life rumble in the background, blending in until the background noise quiets down? I’ve spent a lot of the last year untangling what was storm and what was soundtrack, and I have to tell you that the cacophony of my daily life drowns out a lot. It’s not until I get a moment to myself that realize how big the storm really is.

A friend asked me last week how we survived with infant twins and I answered flippantly. “Oh, you know, I don’t remember much of it!” But once I sat down with the question in a quiet moment, the reality hit me. There was a lot of soundtrack back then — potty training and sleep schedules and playing at the park. But there also a lot of thunderstorm. Rushing to the hospital alone in early labor while Forrest stayed home with our eldest. Getting norovirus all at once and hoping the grown ups would be well enough to care for the kids, fearing what we would do if we weren’t. Realizing I had been severely anemic since the C-section and I was trying to do everything with hardly enough energy to get out of bed.

I look back now and I understand why we didn’t pay attention to the storm. How could we? There was too much going on. But it’s a decade later and because we didn’t pay attention to the thunder, we also didn’t clean up afterwards. We never really talked about what it was like to be stuck in a house for a year with three kids under three, counting the hours until nap time. Or what it was like for Forrest to have so much pressure to keep his job, our health insurance, our livelihood.

On Sunday morning, I saw a friend on Facebook had posted that two 80-foot firs had come down in her yard the night before. One of them had landed inches away from her house. She was thankful that all that had been damaged was her garden, but sad because the trees and the garden were gone.

That’s how I feel about those years. Boy, we got through by the skin of our teeth and wow, do I feel lucky for that. But I miss those trees that fell - my energy, my optimism, my perhaps naive belief that things will just work out. And I guess now that we’ve got time enough time to start cleaning up, maybe the next thing on the list is to do a little re-planting. Perhaps, in another decade, those trees might just grow tall again.

Onions, Part 2

I sat down to write today, hoping that I hadn’t already done a post on onions. As you can tell from the title, I already have, about a year and a half ago. In that post, I mused about how as useful as onions can be, I find myself gravitating towards the more interesting, less predictable veggies. This spring, between one thing and another, boring and predictable became exactly what we were looking for. Long story short, I’ve just come inside from harvesting about 25 pounds of onions.

It was one of those gardening sessions fueled by frustration - a long line and a grumpy clerk at the post office, a day filled with too many errands and not one, but two seemingly easy tasks that I just can’t seem to check off my list. No one in my house deserved my mood so I pulled into the driveway, grabbed my gardening gloves from the garage and got pulling.

Onions are really fun to harvest. Unlike zucchinis and cucumbers, which have prickly vines, or lettuce and herbs, which have to be treated delicately so they will keep producing, onions are pretty straightforward. You grab the green part and pull. Voila! Out pops an onion. Some years I have in me to braid the onion stems to create a pretty and functional kitchen ornament. Not this time. I gleefully took my gardening knife, hacked off the onion greens and tossed the bulbs into a sack.

It was cathartic. By the time I’d harvested half the bed, the sack was full and my frustration had simmered. And, at that point, even with all my uncompleted tasks, I had at least done something productive today. Anger management isn’t the reason we have the garden but it’s certainly an important side benefit. Now, after gardening, and writing, and taking the time for a cup of tea, I’m just about ready to reenter family life…about an hour later than I wanted to, but I think we’ll all be happier that I took a much needed break.

Motivations and Abundance

This time of year is always one of abundance. In addition to our garden, which is pumping out zucchini faster than I can cook it, there’s also an abundance of time, of sun, of fun, of laughter. It’s a tightly held secret, but July, August, and September in the Pacific Northwest are just about perfect. Eighty degree days are just right for swimming in the many lakes and streams, and the evenings drop down into the sixties so any house without air conditioning has a chance to cool off for sleeping. There’s no humidity so any spot in the shade is a refuge and the sun can beat down without feeling sticky or muggy.

We also find ourselves with an abundance of space. Our house, which can feel cramped in the rainy season, has the benefit of a lot of pleasant outdoor spaces. When we all get sick of each other, my kids find some cozy spot in the treehouse or trampoline and I escape to the garden and we all get a little break.

That’s what we’ve needed, after all. A little break. A break from all the extras - from the extracurriculars and extra homework and extraordinary schedule it feels like we keep. Instead, we’ve been able to take walks after dinner and have long conversations over bowls of frozen blueberries from the UPick place. I’ve missed this pace. I didn’t even know it was what I missed, but I missed it.

Every day, after Forrest’s work day is done, I sneak into our bedroom to write and he takes over - they go down to the lake to swim or work on some house project or he cooks dinner while the girls entertain themselves. And weirdly, I find those short hours more productive than the 7-3 schedule I get when school is in session. Every year, I wonder how this could be? How am I writing more and better in these stolen hours than I do when the days stretch out before me, house feeling too quiet without the laughter and bickering?

Maybe it’s that abundance. Because all I need to do today is write. There’s no sports practice to get them to or homework to talk over, or even appointments that need to be scheduled. It’s summer. I have two jobs - keep up with my kids and keep up with my book. And those are the two jobs I love most. It’s easy to find the motivation to do the things I love.

I’ve spent a lot of time over the last year coming to the understanding that just because I’m good at something, that doesn’t mean I love or even like to do it. You might be thinking, “Of course it doesn’t mean that. How do you not know what you like to do?” But it’s not as simple as that, is it? Because I like to be good at things. I like feeling like I’m good at things. I like people telling me that I’m good at things. And if I’m not very, very thoughtful about the difference between liking to be good at things and liking the things I’m good at, it’s easy to conflate the two. If I walk too far down that path, I end up with a life where all I do is check things off a to do list and try to pretend that satisfaction is the same as joy.

They’re not the same. Not even close. But it isn’t until I had the space and time to think about what I actually enjoyed doing that I learned one really crucial lesson. If the only happiness I get from doing something is the feeling I get when I check it off the list, then I had better have a damn good reason for doing it. And there are lots of reasons to do things I don’t like - taking care of my health, keeping our house from devolving into chaos, making sure that my kids grow up to be reasonably well-adjusted human beings. But as I age, as I have less energy, I need to know those reasons.

Because unlike during the summer, when time stretches endlessly before me, fall will come and with it, those familiar rhythms and routines. And when that schedule fills back up again, I don’t want to waste a single minute of it.

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.

Stories and Sturdiness

The world feels a little dark today. It’s summer and the sun is shining and my kids are home for the summer after the longest school year ever and still, it feels dark. One of my kids said yesterday, “I thought once school was over and I wasn’t so tired and stressed that everything would feel easier and it doesn’t.”

“I guess it wasn’t school then, was it?” I said. This wasn’t new to me. I knew that school got blamed for a lot of the storm and stress, but I was twelve once. Middle school is rough, but it’s not the source of all adolescent angst.

“No, and that’s worse.”

She’s not wrong. This is a hard stage. It’s a hard stage for them, and it’s a hard stage to parent them through. There’s a joke that’s been going around the millennial circles. “My kids asked what they get to have now that we didn’t have back in the 80s. The answer was ‘feelings’.”

It’s funny because it’s true. Back in my day, when you felt angsty, you listened to loud music and talked back and maybe snuck out at night. These days, the kids just talk. They talk and talk and talk. They say things like, "I don’t have enough impulse control; can you help me with strategies to save money?,” and “I wish I could tell my younger self how things were going to be,” and “I want to be nice, but she crossed my boundaries and I’m not sure if I can trust her anymore.”

It’s not just my kids, either. I spent a wonderful week with some of my nieces and nephew and I’ll be damned if I didn’t hear more honest expression of emotions in that week than I did throughout my entire childhood. If I were older, less far along on my own journey, I might scoff at it as faddish pseudo-science. But they really are kinder, more rational, less impulsive and more thoughtful than I ever was.

And that’s what makes it hard to parent. Because my impulses don’t make sense anymore. Forrest and I often talk about how differently things were handled when we were kids. If a kid was mean to you, you got back at them - maybe physically, maybe verbally - but you certainly didn’t tell them that they hurt your feelings. If a teacher acted unfairly, you glowered and glared and committed small mutinies - we didn’t have a conversation about how a lot of adults are unhappy with their lives and how that might come out with power trips and arbitrary rules.

I often find myself offering advice and realizing that it no longer applies. And instead, I’m looking at them and wishing that I knew then what they seem to know now. They seem sturdier, somehow, than the brittle teenager I was.

A few weeks ago, my girls and I were walking through the mall and we walked past a store. I mentioned that it existed back when I was a teen but that I had never shopped there.

“Why not?” they asked.

I explained that when I was a teen, you sort of decided what kind of person you wanted to be and what group you wanted to fit into and then you dressed the part. And the girls who shopped from that store were part of a wilder, more risque group. And if you wore clothes from there, then people would assume that you drank, you smoked, you dated around.

They couldn’t comprehend it. Why would teenage Serenity care? I knew that I didn’t do any of those things. If I wore a pair of jeans from the ‘wrong’ store and someone judged me, what did it matter? They could think what they wanted about my morality. I knew the truth.

My kids couldn’t understand and I couldn’t explain it. Why did we care so much? Why do I still care so much? I know who I am. I know the kinds of choices I make. I should be more sure of myself. I should remember all the times I did the right thing, lived up to my values.

I wish it were that simple, but a lifetime of people pleasing doesn’t disappear in a day. And while I am sturdier than them in terms of day to day mood swings, I have a sneaking suspicion that it won’t be long before they’re the ones setting a good example for me, while I lag behind, trying to keep up.

I can’t wait.

Rest and Revolution

We’re in between trips at the moment, coming off of an amazing and exhausting week with family and getting ready for an amazing and exhausting international trip. I’ve spent the last year operating at probably 60% of my usual capacity but I’m me, so that means that slowly but surely, I’ve been checking the boxes and making plans. I’ve had to find a new way of being this year. One that thinks far ahead but also finally accepts that not every contingency can be planned for; not every eventuality can be foreseen.

Last year around this time, I mentioned to my therapist that even when I was sitting still, my mind was racing. I could be sitting on the beach on a sunny day and still, my brain was figuring out what we’d have for dinner, what I had forgotten, what I needed to do next week or next month or next year.

“You’re leaking energy, Serenity,” she said. “No wonder you’re so tired.”

“What are you talking about?”

“You’re never really resting. Even when it seems like you’re resting, you’re figuring out the next thing on your to-do list."

She was right. I was so in the weeds of life that I truly couldn’t be still. I couldn’t relax.

I’ve spent a year learning how to do just that. To stop thinking of what problems I needed to anticipate and instead work on only the problems in front of me. Because yes, if I think about the whole three weeks of travel with all the trains, planes and automobiles, I’m going to be an anxious insomniac. But if instead, I ask myself, what’s next? Well, then that’s just one thing. And sometimes what’s next is snuggling the dog or eating a bowl of ice cream or reading a book I love.

I wish I could say that I’m as productive as I was back when I was exhausted. I’m not. And a fair number of people have let me know that the efforts of my life have been found wanting. It’s amazing what people will say right to your face. But you know who’s not saying it?

The four people who matter most. Forrest and the girls have been overjoyed. Because back when I was constantly volunteering, writing, planning and stressing, I was in fact not very much fun to hang out with. You might even say that I was a bit of a bear. And now that I spend my days learning to live with the unexpected, I spend less time worrying about what could be and more time enjoying what is.

A lot of people act like that’s easy. To just be in the moment. But the reality is that a lot of the moments in my life kind of suck. I have three adolescent daughters. Enjoying what is involves a lot of reminding myself that no, I am not the worst mom ever and yes, I can be more patient that any human should have to be. It takes work to stay present - to not give in to worries for the future, to not lament the passage of time. To really believe that the best place to be is where I am.

If all that sounds woo-woo, you don’t have to tell me. I agree. It’s weird and it’s woo woo and it’s new agey and it’s also true. Capitol “T” true. The anxiety-ridden hustle culture will burn the heart out of us if we let it. It’ll bleed us dry and charge us for the privilege. That’s not to say we don’t have to work - I mean, dinner still has to get on the table, right? But this is different. This is letting go of the fear that if we don’t stay on top of our whole future all at once, we will lose everything we have worked for.

That’s the lie. That if we relent and relax, even for a moment, that everything we have built will fall down. That we will become worthless and useless and all those horrible words people use to tear down another person. Rest is revolutionary, if only because it’s so rare.

So today, after I finish writing this, what’s next is a cup of tea and a chapter or two of a long-loved book. And if I’ve forgotten something for my trip? That’s ok. That’ll be some other moment’s “What’s next?”

Sage

I’m not sure exactly why, but the sage I planted two years ago has decided that it loves my garden more than anything else and I should probably let it keep taking everything over. I don’t disagree, exactly, except that I only need so much sage and while the flowers are pretty, I’m interested in a little more variety than sage everywhere, all the time. So I prune it back and do my best, but unfortunately, I’m married to Forrest, who has never seen an unwanted plant he wouldn’t be happy to find a space for.

Every year, our local elementary school holds a plant sale and of course we go up and buy some things. This year, I mentioned to them that our cucumbers had died in some late spring storms so any extras that they had, I would be happy to buy at the end, after all the parents had had a chance. When I sent Forrest up to get them an hour later, he returned home with not only the cucumbers, but also every single extra plant that they hadn’t sold.

“They were just going to compost them!” he protested. I have no idea if this was true, but what I do know is that he has carefully found a spot for every single one of those plants, including in other people’s gardens. For a week or two there, if you came to our house, you were leaving with a pumpkin plant.

Which brings me back to the sage. We have a brick planter in our front yard, one that has been here since long before we moved it. At first, it had a beautiful lavender bush, but during the baby years, we didn’t have time to prune it, so it got too woody and ended up dying. We’ve tried replanting lavender a number of times, but the trees around it have also grown up and now it’s too shady to take. I’ve gone back and forth on what to plant there, usually just giving up and letting ferns take over, but this year, I was too busy or preoccupied and before I knew it, he’d snuck in four sage plants that I had been keeping in an old pot on the back porch.

Like the plant sale starts, I had been planning on composting them. The plastic pot was old and starting to crack, the sage was rootbound, and the whole thing was a bit of an eyesore. But stubborn as he is, he carefully separated them, unwinding the intertwined roots and giving them new life. To his mind, they might not take to their new home, but some chance is better than just throwing them out.

And of course, that sage is thriving. Even with the spring storms, it has grown, flowered, and is covered in happy bees bouncing around. And I’m simultaneously pleased and annoyed. What am I going to do with all that sage? Because let me tell you, when summer comes, my kids will be out there harvesting it and drying it and presenting me with old jam jars full of the stuff. I’ve still got some from last year!

As for Forrest, ’m not even sure he has noticed. In fact, I know he hasn’t, because if he had, he’d definitely be smiling frustratingly and very specifically not saying, “See? I told you those plants were still good.” But luckily for me, he’s too busy trying to rescue some overgrown raspberry canes, carefully splitting them up and finding new places to stash them, planting them where I’m sure they will happily thrive.

Pep Talks and Sunny Days

It’s 8:45 in the morning here and I’m on my second cup of coffee and my third round of trying to get writing. Summer has finally arrived here and every part of me wants to go outside. Of course, summer mornings in Seattle mean that it’s only 55 degrees so I’ll need a jacket and long pants, but the sun is out and that’s all that matters.

But it’s also a Tuesday and so I really need to do some work. My kids only have another week of school and then the schedules get crazy. Forrest and I have become really good at juggling the work from home/parenting divide, but the twins are just competent enough to get into some real scrapes if there are no adult eyes around. I’d like to say that they’re maturing, but there’s something about the middle school years that just makes smart decision making go out the window.

They know it, too. One of them was talking last night about needing to finish a science project and I suggested that they use the extra time in their school day to put in a few minutes here and there. Race through lunch and get to the library, skip talking to friends in the morning and go to homeroom early, that sort of thing. Her response summed it up.

“You know I don’t have the impulse control to do that!”

And she doesn’t. If there’s a gaggle of friends, that’s going to win out over some google slides every time. Luckily for her, this afternoon will be long and boring and just right for finishing a project. It’s easier, somehow, for me to help her get her work done than it is for me to help me get my work done.

Because on a sunny day, I barely have the impulse control to do this. That’s the hard part about being a writer. There’s no boss, no end of the year metrics, no goals and no bonuses. I’m doing this for myself and that means that if I don’t do it, the only person I let down is myself.

Myself is the easiest person to let down. She’ll forgive me. She’ll understand. She’ll see the whole context and change the goalposts and remind me of all the times I haven’t let myself down and now, shouldn’t I give up just a little, as a treat?

As I get older, I wonder more and more why I work so hard not to disappoint even a perfect stranger, but I am perfectly happy to disappoint myself. It’s not like I don’t know how to set aside my short-term wants for a long-term goal. Or how to endure discomfort for something more important. How many times have I had a sleepless night caring for someone else, but rarely a restful day caring for myself? How often have I said to my work, “I’ll get to you later,” while helping a friend or community member during a rough or stressful time? There’s obviously nothing wrong with dropping everything to help other people. But I think somewhere along the way, I forgot I was people too. And the same part of me that can pep talk my kids can pep talk me, too.

I don’t mean that in a self-indulgent, girlboss kind of way, either. I think there’s this strain of hustle culture, self care mindset that says, “Don’t put yourself last!” but really means, “Ignore everyone else!” We all know someone like that. Someone who is so into meeting their own goals that they don’t care how it gets done. Sometimes they don’t even care if they actually accomplish anything, as long as it appears that they have. As long as the Instagram looks amazing, they must be successful, right? Right?!?

It’s not that kind of shallow pep talk - I’m talking about the one you would give to a child. The one where you remind them that when you work hard at something, the work itself can become the reward. The one where you tell them that learning new things always feels disorienting at first, where you always feel inept and uncomfortable until you figure things out, but that the steadiness you gain doesn’t leave you, even if twenty years later, you can’t remember the formula for the area of a trapezoid. That steadiness that you’ll use, time and again, to keep trying new things, keep learning, keep going after whatever’s next.

Until you’re a grown-up, who maybe doesn’t want to sit down and work on another blank manuscript page because you feel inept and uncomfortable and wouldn’t it be easier to go outside and sit in the sun for a while? But someone once upon a time taught you that the feeling of the sun will be so much nicer if you know that you didn’t disappoint yourself, that you did the best you could, and that the rest is so much nicer with the feeling of satisfaction of a job well done…or well, at least done, anyway.

Reading and Rules

The other day my phone pinged me with one of those “This Day 10 Years Ago” things. Of course. I clicked because ten years ago I had the most adorable kids and also absolutely no sleep, so every video that comes up is pretty much new to me. I once read that short term memory turns to long term memory during deep sleep and since I didn’t get a whole lot of that when my kids were four and two, it checks out that I don’t remember a whole lot.

This one in particular was of my eldest daughter reading to me. She was an early reader since she has always loved books but the arrival of her sisters meant that us grownups were often too busy to read out loud during those chaotic, messy days. So she just convinced us to teach her how and she hasn’t gone a day without a book pretty much since.

As soon as I finished the video, I thought about how that little early reader book was probably one of the first ones she read on her own, and how many, many more books she has read since then, and how many, many more she’ll read. It’s funny, this parenting thing. If it all goes well, you (and your help) is the most important thing in the world just up until they learn how to do the thing, and then, poof! You’re redundant, maybe even a hindrance.

When the twins learned to ride bikes, there were, well, two of them, so it was a two parent job. Again, they needed help just up until the moment they figured it out, and from then on, Forrest and I were, at best, in the way. At worst, I was an obstacle, me and my rules about not riding full speed towards a major road.

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about the scaffolding that we put up for ourselves. Rules we make when we’re young, to help us organize the overwhelming transition to becoming adults. Things like: “The Dishes Get Done Right After Dinner”. Or “We Spend Christmas Eve At Nana’s House.” Or “Bills Get Paid The Day They Arrive.”

These are important. There are so many choices that we could make and so many choices we could make wrong. And then as we get older, we add more and more. No Coffee After Four. Thursday Nights Are Leftover Nights. Take A Walk After Breakfast Every Day. The Milk Goes On The Top Shelf Of The Fridge.

And none of those are bad rules. To be honest, I like the way things are managed around here. But there’s nothing like a teenager to remind you that the rule you think of a supportive is also a type of restriction. It’s natural, of course. They’ve got to figure out where their rules are. Which ones they want to keep and which ones they want to change. But even in the most peaceful household that process is messy.

One of my rules is "Everyone Settled Down By Eleven P.M.” I didn’t even know I had that one, but once the fourteen year old started staying up until midnight, it was made very clear to me. I should have remembered, as a former teenager myself, that there’s something a bit magical about midnight in a quiet house, when you can eat what you like, watch what you like and just stretch out and enjoy having the place to yourself. She’s certainly realized it. And it wasn’t until the other day when I finally said, “Shouldn’t you be getting to bed?” that I realized that just like reading and bike riding, I was there the first time she fell asleep (and for a lot of nights after) but that she doesn’t need my input on her sleep schedule anymore.

And she’s right. There’s no problem, no bleary eyes, no dropping grades, just a teenager doing what teenagers do. And isn’t that the point? To do the best we can and then let them live their lives? Wasn’t this was I wanted, back when bedtime routines were an hour long and full of tears and tantrums? If I were to go back tell myself that not only did I not need to enforce bedtime, but that any participation I had would be considered rude, I think younger Serenity would pop some champagne and go take a nap.

So, I suppose instead of the storm and stress, maybe I should take a page out of their book. Which rules do I want to stick to, and which ones are sort of maybe kind of holding me back? If I have to deal with the snarkiness of the teenage household, I guess I might as well use it to my advantage, after all. And if I don’t figure it out all at once, not to worry, the twins are only twelve and they will definitely let me know which rules are less than necessary.

Wattle Fences

I don’t know when I first learned about wattle fences, but I do know that I’ve wanted one from the very moment I heard of them. For those of you not in the know about various types of garden borders, 1) congratulations on having much cooler interests than me and 2) a wattle fences are made by weaving flexible branches around posts made from sturdier branches. Basically, you take branches that are wrist-width (ish) and put them upright in the ground, and then you take thin, whip like branches and weave them in and out. As you weave them, the whole thing becomes quite strong and sort of holds itself together. Traditionally this is done with willow branches, which is where my desire to have a wattle fence stopped. We don’t have a willow in our yard and the idea of sourcing one just so I could make a wattle fence seemed a little absurd.

Enter Forrest. His spring project this year was to clear out an area that had once been covered in a beautiful forsythia but had long been choked out by blackberries and ivy. We’d left it all up for a long time, probably longer than we should have, because it provided a really nice barrier between us and the road that goes along our house. But, enough was enough and if we were to have any hope of saving the forsythia, he needed to clear it out and salvage what he could.

And clear it out he did. After having a lot of fun with a chainsaw, we were left with a lot of dead blackberry canes and a fair amount of sickly looking forsythia. A friend of ours who just happens to be a master gardener advised us to do a lot of trimming, only leaving the strongest parts, in the hopes that without so much foliage to support. the forsythia can bounce back.

The upshot of all this is that Forrest found himself with a lot of vine-like branches. And I think you can imagine that I’ve mentioned the wattle fence to him more than a few times, so, while I took a bunch of tween girls for boba tea this Saturday, he took the initiative and surprised me. I returned home to half a fence and a very excited Forrest.

Not just him, either. Two of my girls got into the fun and it was eleven o’clock at night when I finally called them in to stop wattling and go to bed already. I guess there’s something rather meditative about the weaving process and they can’t seem to resist how magical and charming it makes the kid garden look.

It’s funny, isn’t it — I’m the one who wanted the fence, but in the end it was them that built it, who caught on to the excitement and who rightfully feel the satisfaction of a job well done. There’s a lot of things like that for me right now. I’ve been dealing with some moderately annoying health issues - nothing terminal, but just enough that I don’t exactly have “build a fence” energy right now. And as anyone who has had chronic health stuff knows, you try not to ask too much of the people around you because you never know when you might have a day where you need to ask a lot of them.

So I would never think of asking Forrest to do something like that, let alone my kids. But when I say that, when I say, “You didn’t have to do that for me,” they just laugh and smile and remind me that they didn’t. They did it because it’s cool and fun and yeah, maybe a little because if makes mom happy and who doesn’t want a few brownie points with mom? But it’s that in a life that can seem a little too online, there’s something wholesome about building something from nothing.

I get tired a lot these days. It’ll pass, I know, but I spend more time than I would like staring out the window, watching the bees flit from flower to flower and the most amazing part about it is that although I planted those flowers, I didn’t do it for them. I did it for me. But in the end, they’re the ones that love it most. I’m not really sure what that means, except maybe that we don’t get to decide what other people do for us. And sometimes the things we do for ourselves actually end up giving back more than we could have ever anticipated.

Painting and Procrastination

For as long as I can remember, I have wanted a house with a window seat. The idea of sitting there, curled up with a book and a cup of tea, sounds like perfection. Unfortunately, I’ve never lived in a house that had room for a window seat. There are no bay windows in my single-story mid-century modern house and to be honest, no nooks or crannies at all.

But I’m a grown up now and it turns out that means if I really want it so bad, I can build a window seat in my house, architecture be damned. And by build it myself I mean that I can ask Forrest very nicely to build a window seat for me and then, after many months of hemming and hawing, he will do it for me.

Now, it’s fully built and ready for the last step: I need to paint it. We’re making it white to match the trim and I do a lot of painting around here, so I’ve got plenty of primer and trim paint left over, not to mention my trusty mini roller and angled brush. All I need to do now to fulfill a decades long dream is actually paint it.

It’s been two weeks and I haven’t even touched a paintbrush. Until yesterday, I told myself that I was working on manuscript revisions, significant ones, and so I really couldn’t take a day off. But I finished those and sent them on. Then I immediately, stood up, stretched and went and stared at the project I’ve been putting off.

For those of you who have known me for a long time, this might be surprising. I am the opposite of a procrastinator. The idea of having something hang over my head is so unbearable that I cannot handle it, not even for an hour. If something comes across my desk, I just get up and do the project. Not because it’s the right time, or because I like the satisfaction of finishing something I started, but because I can’t rest until it’s done.

But as I age, I’ve realized that that impulsivity doesn’t lead to a job well done. It just leads to a job done. Sometimes procrastination makes sense. Not in a putting it off forever kind of way, but as a signal that there’s something missing. Maybe we need more information on how to complete a task. Maybe we don’t feel competent enough and need more instruction. Maybe we don’t have the supplies we need and aren’t really being honest that getting the supplies is a task in and of itself. Maybe we don’t really think that the task needs doing or we resent that we’re the one who needs to do it or we think it’s a waste of time.

Emotions, even emotions like disinterest or lack of motivation, are good signals that there’s something else going on. Sometimes I know what that something else is, but often, I have to dig deeper. I could berate myself into ignoring that, just do the job, but like I said, there are a lot of good reasons we might be pausing on a project.

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about productivity. When I was younger, I felt like I wasn’t particularly good at much, but I could outwork any failings I might have had. There was no problem or project I couldn’t take care of, as long as I had enough caffeine. And then I had kids, when productivity is basically forced on you. With three kids under four, there wasn’t a whole lot of time for rest.

But that’s over now. I mean, I still have kids, but they’re big and they do half the chores around here and they’re gone at school or sports or friends’ houses and for the first time in a long time, I could choose not to be productive. Or not as productive anyway. Dinner’s still got to be made.

And unlike my younger self, caffeine just isn’t doing it anymore. And I don’t want to talk to myself the way I used to - I think about the words I used to say to get myself moving: “Don’t be lazy.” “God, I’m such a slacker.” “Not going to get anywhere sitting on the couch.”

I would never say those words to my kids. And I would never allow anyone else to. That might make you think that I'm indulgent, but they would disagree. I have high standards for them, but we don’t talk like that around here. I have high standards for me, too. But maybe those standards are less about doing lots of things, and more about doing the right things well. Productivity doesn’t really factor into that equation, does it?

And that right there is the deeper reason why I’m not painting that window seat right now. It’s my first time painting unfinished wood and I want to do it right. Which means I need to sand and prime and sand and paint and maybe sand and paint again. And that will take a long time, and be disruptive to the whole house and I know that it will be an utter pain in the neck. But this project means something to me. I want to do it well.

So, I suppose I’m going to trust that if I pick a day and clear my schedule and cross my fingers it’s nice enough to paint and trust that the motivation will follow. And maybe then I can make my dreams come true, even little ones like window seats.

Intensive Gardening

It finally got nice here and so Forrest and I spent most of the weekend outside. Well, he spent most of the weekend outside. I spent most of the weekend down a rabbit hole, learning about historical styles of intensive gardening. If that sounds really nerdy, that’s because it is. I will get to the point, but first, buckle up because you’re going to learn about them too.

Our garden is basically just our front yard, which over the years has grown to include 15 raised beds. (For the record, Forrest says it’s 19 but he’s being ridiculous. My tulip planters do not count as raised beds.) Since the beginning we’ve done a variation of French intensive gardening, which means we grow our plants in raised beds that we keep extremely nutrient rich, and when possible, we plant compatible vegetables side by side to maximize production. (Think planting lettuce, which matures early, next to brussels sprouts, which take a while, so you can get the lettuce grown and harvested while the sprouts are still…well, sprouting.)

French intensive gardening is old news around here; it’s just what we do. But a few weeks ago, Forrest tilled our flower beds and I realized that the three of them created a terrace of sorts, with three different levels. Figuring out what to plant there is what dug my rabbit hole. Because English intensive gardening very much uses vertical space to allow access to plants that are grown right next to each other. It’s not usually called English intensive gardening, though. It’s more often known by its more fanciful name: the English cottage garden. These days, the cottage garden mostly holds flowers, but its origins in medieval times included medicinal herbs, seasonings, and practical flowers that would attract bees, who then provided honey for the household.

I decided to repurpose our flower beds into a cottage garden, one that will attract bees, but also grow sage, thyme, chives, rosemary, mint, and lavender for our house. Forrest and I spend a fun few hours with me telling him where to dig holes and him trying to save every last chive plant. It’ll take two years to come to fruition, but I’m excited to use the space better than we have been.

Because that’s what intensive gardening is all about. Using space better. And while America does have its own version of intensive gardening (called square foot gardening and pioneered by Rodale, Inc. from my hometown of Emmaus, PA), the historical antecedents of limited space and needed productivity date back centuries. As I was regaling Forrest with all of my new found facts, he looked at me and said, “What about this makes it so interesting to you?" I chose not to listen to the implication that he didn’t share my fascination and instead, I considered his question.

The answer is…I grew up in a world where everyone acted like there were no constraints anymore. The Cold War was over, the glass ceiling was broken, and the recessions of the 80s were over. Everything from cars to houses to fast food portions were big and getting bigger. There was no reason to stop growing…ever. And now, I am raising my children in a very different world.

I agree that there are no reasons to stop growing. But growth doesn’t always mean getting bigger and taking up more space. Sometimes, it means putting in the work to make the space you have more functional. Growth for my garden has meant changing what I plant and where I plant it. For Forrest, it’s meant turning a hill that used to be a mere annoyance into a terrace for more cucumbers. For my kids, it’s meant learning to live around the bugs and bees that also find our garden delightful.

I don’t look to the wisdom of the past all that often. Technology has taken us much too far for me to believe that we should give up on modern science. But there’s something about working within constraints that encourages creativity, beauty, and appreciation. We have a small house and a small yard and that means that every square foot counts. It also means that the compost from our home is enough to fertilize all 15 of those beds, if we use our space wisely.

Our world is both very large and very small. And if we can find the possibility in both, then we are equipped to meet whatever life throws as us. Especially a sunny weekend where we fall down a rabbit hole.

P.S. - For all my talk about French, English, and American intensive gardening, German intensive gardening caught my attention the most. Called hugelkultur, or mound culture, it involves basically piling up different types of biodegradable materials that break down over years, and then covering it all in dirt, and then planting on top of that. The mounds are often straight but can be spiral or horseshoe shaped and all I can say is…I am extremely curious.