Castles in the Dirt

"Digging up and destroying?" asked the neighbor from across the street as she opened her mailbox and pulled out a couple of letters.
"Yeah," said my sister. "We’re trying to make the yard look better."
"Well, that would be nice," said the lady, running her eyes around our front yard as she spoke. "There’s always stuff to do around the house, isn’t there?"
"It’s kinda fun," my sister said.
"Well, I’m glad you think so." She laughed. "I’ll have to have you over to my house some time."
She said, "See you later," and waggled her hand at us as she turned away.
I had been the silent observer. Sometimes things make me mad, and then I just keep my mouth shut.
"Fun is relative," I said to myself and then again out loud to Tasha. Tasha sort of laughed an agreement and carried on swinging the pick. I picked up a brick and almost ran with it to the pile. I was mad and I was thinking.

The reason Tasha said yard work was fun was not because she finds uncanny joy in shoveling dirt. And lugging twenty-pound bricks around the yard is not something I'd pick up as a hobby. 


A garden is like a baby. 
Are changing diapers and giving spankings fun? No. I guess moms and dads do it anyway, because what they see is not the burden of one more dirty diaper to throw in the trash.
They see their child. They try to imagine him on his fifth birthday and what he will look like when he is twenty and what he will do when he is a man. When he's young, they plant seeds and watch him as he grows. And when he is mature and beautiful, he brings joy to them and to lots of other people.


I can understand my neighbor's bewilderment. I can imagine myself sitting at the office from seven in the morning until five at night. Driving home. Picking up my kid from his friend's. Dumping my stuff. Fetching the mail. The last thing I want to do is clean the house, never mind remodel or garden. Then the neighbor kid says, "Shoveling dirt is fun." Fun? Uh...no, it isn't. Fun is taking two weeks off of work and going on a Caribbean Cruise. Fun is having my kid out the house and retiring, so I can spend a little more time on myself.


Most people aim to have fun. But, fun -- it eats your time and years away and it leaves you with nothing but golden memories,
which are great, but they're only photographs
and they'll turn to dust in time.
Fun isn't the goal. It'll leave you feeling empty. Life is so much more than that. It's so much harder. It's so much more worth it. When I am old, Lord willing, I can die knowing that I'm not leaving behind dusty, out-of-date photographs. I am passing on a living legacy.
This brings joy and joy is the real thing.

Tasha and I, we like to work side-by-side. We stop digging in the dirt every now and then to talk about an idea for the garden and then as I work, I imagine the front yard, green and level and a fence built between the row of pines. Ivy will grow on the side of the house. The hen house will have a coat of paint the same color as the house. The house will be painted and the deck will by stained. Tasha wants to make the back yard woods into a secret garden and we'll hang Christmas lights in the trees. And I want to put stone rabbits along the path in the woods.
This is what makes gardening fun.
Digging ain't fun.

Above are eggs from our four chickens and below is Punk sitting on them.

[Calvin named her, by the way]

[Photos courtesy of Tasha]