Why?

My friend Reesa and I were talking a few months ago.  She was showing me how to slurp up my blog into a book.  Our conversation took a turn towards my thoughts on the things I had learned from pulling weeds in my yard.  She said maybe I should write them down and share them.  Well here we are.

In the 1980's I listened to J Richard Clark give a talk called, "The Value of Work".  In it he stated that as parents we should provide opportunities for our children to work and teach them the joy in it.  Well his talk stuck with me.  I really have wanted to be a good mom so I decided one of the types of work the children and I could do together would be to pull the weeds in the yard.  It would be easier to mow them down, poisen them, or just keep the ground barren without watering but I started this quest just from his few comments.

The last two years or so I have resorted to letting the boys mow the yard.  Last month I really looked at it and it was solid with weeds.  Sure it mowed up green, but the little sticky weeds were everywhere.  I had been feeling less motivated  or shall we say enthusiastic about life in general.  It was just a list of chores I was doing daily.  So I banned mowing and began to soften the dirt with extra water, then I began pulling the weeds.  The grass grew taller, and yes, this was August and it was hot.
I would stop and write down things I remembered with the children that I will share later, and then new quiet thoughts filtered in, I wrote those too. 

September 7th the weeds were all pulled.  Benjamin and I mowed.  Then we trimmed the edges, the trees and the vines untill it was some place that I love to drive up to now.  Still there are piles of stuff on the porch but I can see progress and for me that motivates me to keep going.

I'll probably never be a master gardener, and I only labor as I have strength, but I will keep trying, sometimes lagging behind, sometimes playing catch up.  (Yes I know this is one large run on sentence.)  This week though you will be hard pressed to find 10 weeds in the green of the front yard.