Just Be Done With It

Two springtimes ago, I was showing a friend the progress I had made on one of my gardens, and based on her reaction I can only assume she didn’t see what I saw. Gesturing over at the still-blank property line on the north side of our village lot, behind our old carriage house, she said, “Why don’t you just plant some rhododendrons or forsythia and be done with it?”

Now, at that point we’d been in our house for only about two years, and certainly there were voids in that garden. There still are. But I had just mulched a few of my flowerbeds, as well as a path I’d dug to border one of them, and in the process eliminated an unsightly mound of wood chips I’d had the tree guys leave behind when they removed dying trees for us. I’d also reconfigured my compost area into three neat collection bins I’d made from metal hardware cloth, and I was feeling pleased and not a little proud. So I was taken aback. Be done with it? I was just getting started.

To be clear, rhododendrons and forsythia can be beautiful in the right place. My mild aversion to these plants, though, kicks in when they’re used—and to my mind, overused—unimaginatively and in the wrong setting. They’re often a default choice, as my friend had suggested them to me. Rhododendron and forsythia, and while I’m on a roll I’ll throw arborvitae under the bus too, tend to be the shrubs people select when they aren’t able or don’t want to drink deeply from the well of landscaping design possibilities. But one of the reasons we moved was for me to have a bigger piece of property to putter around on, so the overgrown yard surrounding our house was an opportunity I didn’t want to miss. I did want to think hard about what the options—my options—were along that forlorn and cluttered and kind of neglected patch of shade.

This friend’s house and gardens are beautiful. I’d even go so far as to say resort-like. My visits to her home have been a treat, as much for the surroundings as for the pleasure of being in her and her family’s company. They had their house built a year or two before we moved into ours, and she started the gardens from scratch, with less-than-ideal, construction-site soil. I had noticed that her gardens are decidedly farther along than mine, but she fessed up that one of her secrets, in addition to her enviable design sense, is that she’ll buy the mature plant every time, preferably one that’s flowering already, if flowering is something the plant will be doing. Why have to wait? Plop down the cash or swipe the debit card or pull out the credit card or do whatever it is a person does with Venmo or ApplePay (I have no idea) and be done with it. Just a glance at her gardens reveals the success of her strategy.

My gardens too were started from scratch, because the prior owners had no gardens at all. But just to get to the planting stage I had to spend three seasons clearing the backlog from our yard and at the edges of all the neighbors’ yards, because none of them weed, at least not where it would make a difference to me. My husband and son and I have since made significant progress on our small landscape, but there’s still plenty more to do. This, however, is what I signed on for.

One of my next-door neighbors is also someone who routinely purchases flowering plants that are already at maximum size and in full bloom. I most certainly benefit, since I can see most of what she sticks in the ground, but I feel like her gardens are a bit too ready-made, not so much planted as installed like sculpture. I can see the appeal of sculpture in lieu of plants, given how much time, effort, and financial commitment gardens can require, but I’m more strongly swayed by a thought expressed in an episode of Real Gardens, an old program featuring English television presenter Monty Don: “A static garden, I think, is almost a dead one, in some ways.”

One of the especially fastidiously cared for yards in the village where I live strikes me as exemplifying that kind of motionless, fixed garden, if “garden” is even the right word for it. Its lawn is absolutely weed free and carpet-like, the shrubs are pruned to precision, and the owners can often be seen sitting on their front porch reading the newspaper and enjoying coffee or a cold beer or a glass of wine, or whatever it is that people drink when they live in a world where every last blade of grass is in its right and proper place. This perfection and their tidiness fascinate me, because these people’s struggle seems to be over, if they ever went through one to begin with. I, on the other hand, feel like I’m always breaking a sweat and walking around in a state of wondering what the heck I’m doing wrong, if I am in fact doing anything wrong, which I may not be. Because I can no longer imagine life without the work of tending a garden, and when it comes to the broad strokes of landscaping and the small details of planting and maintaining our half acre, I have no expectation of instant gratification. I don’t even desire it. I do look forward to arriving at the ultimate destination—a sanctuary of gardens I can be proud of and that give me pleasure—and I do think I’ll get there eventually. But I’m also interested in the view out the passenger window along the way, even in the long stretches of road where the scenery is dreary. I want to plant seeds and wait for them to sprout. I want to have to keep checking on the progress of my seedlings. I want to get dirt under my nails and occasionally hurt my shoulder lifting rocks that are too heavy. I’m in for all of it. Then again, it would be nice to have clean fingernails. And plants that I don’t have to go down on my hands and knees to find. And time, or maybe it’s only an inclination that I lack, to sit on the front porch or in the side yard and read a book with a cup of coffee in my hand.

On more than one occasion this summer, I spent all day weeding, only to have more to do on subsequent days. And whereas I typically let the rain handle most of my plants’ watering needs, this year I stood with hose or watering can in hand to keep my leafy investments from shriveling up and turning to dust. Even in non-drought years, I find that just when I’ve gotten to a good stopping point in the list of tasks needed to keep my yard looking well tended during the growing season, the gosh-darn season changes. And there I am, full speed ahead, until winter, when I and my garden can be still for a while. Or actually longer than a while, since unlike in Vivaldi’s Le quattro stagioni, winter here goes on the longest out of all the seasons, or at least it feels like it does.

But there’s not much rest for the weary. In my garden, as in any other garden, the emphatically nonstatic swirl of living and dying and coming back to life produces a seemingly endless amount of detritus and messiness that in turn create a seemingly endless list of chores. A statue or two really would be easier.

I suppose, though, that it’s the endlessness of gardening—always another chance to get things right—that’s addictive, kind of like the game Wordle, but with flowers or veggies as a reward. I love the act of gardening, not just the pretty results and the more intellectual parts like design and knowing how to prune and when not to fertilize. I’m on board for the subsistence-level tasks that most sensible adults would make their kids do instead. To quote the program Real Gardens again, “You have to do it yourself.” I’m not saying that I don’t have days where I think, Really? This is my life? Usually that feeling correlates with how much time I’ve spent working for free, or only the occasional “Oh, hey, thanks for doing that” along the periphery of the neighbors’ yards. Nonetheless, I proceed, mostly undeterred by the tedium of the grunt labor, and able to see beyond current disappointments or frustrations or an excessive workload to a brighter day. After every windstorm, a seemingly frequent occurrence these days, I pick up all the twigs and branches that our oak tree sheds and happily put them to use as kindling for our winter fires. In the fall, I rake leaves and acorns from our lawn, then congratulate myself on my resourcefulness as I pile them under the hydrangea hedge as mulch. I go to the bother of collecting food scraps in a container under the kitchen sink and, as compensation for my time, allow myself to feel smug about how I rarely have to buy compost. One routine task I tend not to muster the energy and ambition to do, however, is put away our rusty old wheelbarrow when I’ve finished using it. Instead I leave it out to clutter up the yard. But I confess that I like seeing it in its usual parking spot under the eighty-foot-tall Norway spruce behind our carriage house, a tableau that juxtaposes that which is established, the spruce, with an object, the wheelbarrow, that represents work in progress.

So, I think I can safely say that with gardening, I’m all about the journey. Indoors, though, I’m the kid in the backseat asking, “Are we there yet?” And my attitude speeds right past “Just be done with it” to “Can we just be done with it already?” Inside, a mess just feels like a mess, and there’s nothing to be done with it but to clean it up. The upturned clawfoot bathtub that was in our kitchen while the new layers of primer and paint on it dried was also a juxtaposition of established and in progress, but I felt a little less pleased with that tableau.

When we first bought the house, we had to wash walls and floors before we could even move in, because dirt accumulates quickly, and the house had been uninhabited for over a year. We had the tops of the house’s two chimneys rebuilt, a whole lot of sick trees in the yard cut down, some of the floors sanded, the boiler serviced, and the flues for the woodburning stoves inspected. We met with roofers to coordinate replacing the house’s original slate roof, which was too far gone to repair, with a metal roof. My husband began patching holes in plaster walls, and we lined up electricians to do the expensive work of checking and, as needed, replacing electrical wires in a house that was built in the pre-electric era. This was two months’ worth of activity, while we also worked our day jobs, drove our son forty minutes to his new school and picked him up again in the afternoon and then drove him to sports practices three times a week two towns over, dealt with car issues, had the usual doctor and dentist appointments, cooked meals, got our own home ready to sell, and generally just lived life.

Looking back, it seems reasonable that we didn’t quite get to commencing the interior renovations until we actually began living in the house two months later. We had wanted to hold off moving in until more of the messy jobs were undertaken and completed, but it wasn’t practical. Our son, who was ten at the time, started to feel like he was living nowhere, and so for his well-being, and mine too, we moved in. Now, five years later, I’d love to just be done with the phase of renovation that involves all the dirty work I wish we had gotten to before we were in residence, but the problem is that it’s becoming harder and harder to face starting it.

It isn’t that I’m lazy, and it isn’t that I mind the work of scraping paint, for example. I’m not and I don’t. It’s that I can’t cope with the idea of the mess intruding into rooms that actually now look more or less like a home, which is something they didn’t look like for the first three years we lived here. Over these five years, we’ve shared our space with work ladders and drop cloths and sheets of plastic draping down, and scaffolding inside as well as outside, and a workman who left a gaping hole in our ceiling because he carelessly put his foot down in the wrong place in the attic, and bare dangling lightbulbs, and dirty scuffed walls, and peeling paint, and plumbing emergencies, and water pouring through light fixtures during rainstorms, and shower walls held together with duct tape and plastic sheeting, and dripping water caught in buckets and tin cans, and more money than I care to think of spent at hardware stores instead of on pleasant weekend trips, and knowing that after all of this, we’ve barely started work upstairs, and that could potentially mean five more years of messes. And we still haven’t hung pictures on the walls or hooked up the stereo.

Maybe we should have just begun with those last little jobs and not worried about the rest of it. In fact, that’s more or less the tack taken by a former neighbor of ours who bought her first house a couple of years before we bought this one. When we ran into her last year, we were regaling her with our long list of jobs and saying they would take us into our old age. She replied that she doesn’t worry about finishing projects, because she never started any in the first place.

When I was walking our dog earlier this summer—yes, in the thick of all that chaos, we adopted a puppy—a neighbor was out painting the floor of her porch, and we chit-chatted the standard, “Boy, it’s always something with these houses, isn’t it?” But we agreed that condo life, which doesn’t exist in great quantity out this way, or an apartment building with a doorman, which most definitely doesn’t exist at all here, wouldn’t be for us anyway, so we’ll just keep painting and weeding and so forth. Definitely a case of be careful what you wish for because you just might get it. Well, I wished for it and I got it, and I’m aware of how fortunate we are, but I have days, usually ones where I’ve spent all morning vacuuming and dusting and doing laundry, then the afternoon cooking lunch before heading out to weed till I’m filthy and the sun has gone down, where I feel like I’m in an endless round of that antagonistic kids’ game of “Ha, ha. You touched it. It’s yours.” Those chores that you complete just in time to have to start them again are always the hardest for me. At least when you DIY your bathroom or kitchen you can take photos of it. On the contrary, I find that washing socks or wiping down the toilet doesn’t really inspire a reaction of “Gee, I’m really glad I did that.” A friend of mine who I wouldn’t normally describe as droll has a funny line. She says, “We have a very special kitchen sink. It’s self-filling.” If only I could find as much humor in the daily reality as I do in her characterization of it.

On a recent—and, I felt, much-deserved—vacation to the Canadian Maritimes, I saw a dishtowel printed with a drawing of bees buzzing around a hive, and the slogan “Nothing Without Labour.” Not a bad reminder, particularly in stretches—like, oh, the past twenty-two years—when the quantity of house chores and projects seems to outnumber the amount of time available to do them.

The problems to deal with, whether acute plumbing issues or chronic worries like peeling paint, can feel like a hassle, but if I were inclined to look on the bright side of life, I might say that problems are often an opportunity. When the faucet breaks, we have to step up and deal with it (full disclosure: by “we” I mean my husband). When the weeds get out of control in the yard, or the plantings need attention, we (okay, I’m talking about myself here) have to evaluate and strategize. We both usually learn a thing or two in the process.

I read somewhere that, generally speaking, men think in terms of individual tasks and women see the big picture. That seems about right to me. My husband, for instance, is perfectly happy tackling a wide range of household repairs, even if it’s something he’s never done before and has to figure out, or at least watch an online video chronicling someone else’s experience of figuring it out. I joke, however (although, it’s no joke), that he’ll install an antique doorknob after meticulously cleaning, derusting, and polishing it, then stand back to admire his work, and invite the rest of us to admire his work too, and he’ll be able to ignore that the walls around the door are falling down. Or if he notices it, he’ll say, in his most relaxed manner, “Don’t worry, we’ll get to that. One job at a time.” I, on the other hand, will be doing some deep breathing to prevent a panic attack. Or I’ll be escaping to the garden to weed, if trading work for work can be called an escape. I’ll also be thinking about how people who don’t live in old houses are probably at the beach or something. Let’s be honest here: nothing shouts, “I just want to be done with it already” like vinyl-sided new construction.

I think it is the case, though, that with weeding and gardening and home improvement projects alike, each successive pass of work brings us closer to things taking the shape we want them to take. My husband always says that every little bit helps. What I worry about, though, is that in three years’ time, when our son has gone off to college, if college is the path he chooses to take, we’ll still be tackling all those little bits and, in the meantime, more little bits that we need to address will have joined the queue and be waiting impatiently in line as well. Not to mention the poignancy of that deadline—our only child leaving home to launch his adult life—and the overlay of urgency it adds to the need for us to complete larger-impact house projects in time for him to enjoy them too. I’m continually frustrated, though, by being in the position of having to choose between a functioning bathroom and a nice family outing. Maybe that’s at least a small part of why people put off major projects till after the kids have grown. Of course, the bigger picture really is that the house is meant to be in the background, not the foreground. And yet, annoyingly, our houses have kept photo-bombing our family portraits.

But the winds of change are blowing. I can feel them drying the sweat on my face that I worked up while I planted three new shrubs along our driveway, which the guy finally came to dig up the broken asphalt from and then resurface with a clean-looking layer of stone. My husband has nearly finished the nasty work of demolition in our upstairs bathroom and is preparing to cross the threshold into the work of constructing it with real, live working plumbing, or at least he was before he got drawn into repointing the back wall of our house’s stone foundation, which apparently no longer had mortar in it. My son—clearly an apple who hasn’t fallen far from the tree—singlehandedly excavated an area for a more capacious and welcoming back path, and also took it upon himself to declutter and clean both floors of our garage. And in my own fit of tidying, I cut firewood and stacked it in the garage’s freshly straightened-up first story, moving the wood out from under the Norway spruce where I’d also been parking the wheelbarrow, which has been pulled into service elsewhere. Just to the left of where the wheelbarrow had been, I placed our old patio table and chairs. For a few weeks, I could see them from the back window of our kitchen, and while I waited for the pasta water to boil or I vacuumed the kitchen floor or I dried dishes, I’d look out at the table and chairs under the spruce and think that they looked like a nice place to sit for a while. The vista looked permanent, it looked finished. It felt done. They looked like they belonged there. Maybe not that particular table and chairs, which have seen better days, but the promise of rest that they symbolize, an IOU I’ll happily accept. I felt like I’d settled on what should settle there—until I saw the evidence all over the table of the birds that perch in the tree. Then it was back to the drawing board.

Barring small setbacks such as bird poop, it’s nice to begin to see the backlog clear and to see our way past some of the heavy lifting and into some lightness. I just stepped outside to water the lemongrass and nasturtiums in a pretty pot I bought on sale last season. The very fact of us having plants in pots outside, a fussy way to garden, feels to me like we’ve moved up a level or two in Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.

Not long ago, after a full day of chores on a Saturday, and half a day of them on Sunday—during which I ticked off a major task on the spring-cleaning checklist I hold great hope of getting through in time for next spring’s round of cleaning—my husband and son tied our recently acquired canoe onto our small car and we headed up to a nearby lake for an exquisitely relaxing hour and a half. Nothing like sitting in a small boat with your small family on a small lake just as the sun is beginning to set on a beautiful summer day to keep you in the moment. And there was no dog hair to vacuum.

As we paddled the perimeter of the lake, we looked at the houses lining the shore, most of which are not primary residences. Even if we were currently in a position to buy a weekend house, I think I’m all set with cleaning the one we already have, but thanks for asking. It’s easier just to drive the seven miles and enjoy the view of other people’s second houses. Less work, and fewer cash outlays. It was a lovely way to end a weekend of chores—although some of those chores were post-travel catch-up, so I really need to not whine too loudly. It does seem symbolic, though, to have done our work first and then have saved this sweet taste of summer for the end of the day, because at the end of the day, we live where we now live so we can have relatively easy access to this sort of thing, which is what we want to be doing with our time.

But the garden and the house and the life we live in it, as well as the sense of purpose and feeling of ownership and the fact of ownership, are also what we want. Knowing this doesn’t stop me from impatiently asking my husband how much longer it’s going to take him to complete this or that repair. It also doesn’t stop me from reflecting on the toll this ownership has without a doubt taken on us. The weight of the list of things unfinished feels heavy to me. I do know the fable of the ant and the grasshopper and the truth it teaches: essentially, that you have to plant the strawberries before you can sit down, relax, and stuff your face with them, or, in other words, work hard when the going is good in the summer so you can reap the benefits later, when winter comes. The ant, however, probably didn’t live in a house where the temperature in the kitchen during the snowy months habitually falls to below fifty degrees Fahrenheit. I’m definitely ready to be done with that, though maybe not with the excuse it gives us to hover around our small and inefficient but beautiful woodburning stove, cooking dinner, sitting and reading, playing guitar, or lounging and watching movies. It’s kind of our winter canoe. 

Then the snow melts, and the cycle of activity on the house and yard starts again, although it never actually stops, it just moves indoors for a few months. There’s probably no getting past that the house asks a lot from us. The alternative is simply not to have one, and then our life would be a different story. So I avert my attention from the pressing matter of the water-damaged wood floor, and simply hope my foot doesn’t go through it on my way out to pick the kid up from sports practice or, much less frequently, to catch, say, a seven o’clock movie. I look the other way when I pass the rotting corner post of our front porch while heading out to the new day job I started. I resist the urge, after I’ve tidied up a room, to shout, “Nobody touch anything!” because even I can see that that’s ridiculous.

My urge for stasis persists, however, as does, consequently, the more and more pressing need I’m feeling to wrap things up, to fill in the voids, to move on to other pursuits. In concession to this, I planted a forsythia. Old habits die hard, however, so I spent much more time than I should have pruning it to the shape I wanted it to take.