Gardening.
Ha!
Should be called weeding.
How to weed, dig, yank, pull, swear, and sweat your way to a small area free of weeds for a short period of time. Then you start the whole process again in a few weeks, in the hopes that this will somehow improve the look of your struggling, patchy, snail-eaten, smattering of plants, termed ‘your garden.’ Two small children, two dogs, and a cat are not helping ‘your garden,’ either.
You dream of the day when you will have beautiful, lush, green bushes, full plants, flowering shrubs, cherry trees, perhaps tulips and other flowers that you like, but don’t know the names of. You know the kind of garden I’m talking about—the ones you see in your neighborhood, driving in the car, speeding to pick up/drop off a kid. You catch a glimpse of your favourite garden and you think one day, one day, I’ll have a garden like that. For now, I’ll make do with what I’ve got—rather sad looking, struggling-to-survive hostas, half eaten irises that come up every year, a sad looking forsythia bush that for some reason no longer flowers like it used to (you are convinced the tree trimmer guys are to blame for this), and a few tulips here and there that you don’t even remember planting.
You secretly wonder how the few remaining plants in the segregated area of the property with dirt, demarcated by rocks, called ‘your garden,’ could survive. But every year they come back. You just can’t kill them. It really is a small miracle. You pat yourself on the back as these few plants reappear every spring, looking healthy for a short time, until summer hits full on and the hot, dry spell happens. Then you go away for a short holiday and half of the few remaining plants are dead when you return, because you forgot to ask a friend to water them for you while you were away. The ones that are still alive are hearty and come back again next year. You are truly surprised every spring what appears through the dirt.
Gardening is an idea extremely low on the priority list these days, but one day, one day 'the garden,'—your garden—will be a top priority, and you can imagine yourself entertaining friends with stories of plants and flowers, imparting your infinite knowledge on how to garden successfully. You imagine friends admiring your heavenly scented, embarrassment of colour—Your Garden. And how proud you will be! But, of course, you won’t show it. “Oh it’s nothing,” you’ll say, "Anyone can do it."
But for now, when friends come over, you quickly usher them past 'the garden,’ in the hopes that they won’t notice the few, sad, half alive plants. You ignore the comments of concern regarding your plants and hand them a beer or a glass of wine and then a hockey stick, and ask them to play with the kids while you bar-b-que. And without fail, there is always that one dog poo you missed, lying right there, in the dirt, in a big gaping hole between plants. How did I miss that? It’s huge!
Mental note—pick that up later.
Some day, some day, I’ll garden.
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