This season of life, if my infrequent blogging is any indication, is shaping up to be a busy one. Truthfully, I’ve only carved out the time to write something now because I’m avoiding tackling a task that requires a level of focus, brain power, time, and imagination that I just don’t feel I can manage today. These past couple of weeks have come as a bit of a shock to the system and have taken me by surprise. After well over a year of this strange period of our lives – of a lull in our usual flurry of activity, of waiting, of taking life at a slower pace while we collectively re-examined our realities and priorities and dedicated our days to simply existing without the pressure we’ve traditionally placed on achieving and performing – this resurgence of projects, deadlines, multi-tasking, and problem solving sort of snuck up on me. Not that I didn’t expect that, soon, we’d find ourselves falling back into a more steady pace of going more places, doing more things, and resuming some activities and parts of our lives that were on hold or moving in slow motion. But, I suppose, I imagined that we’d inch back into all of that so our bodies and brains would have time to adjust and work back up to functioning at a heightened clip. I didn’t anticipate the bustle and chaos would re-emerge quite so quickly, ferociously, or with such immediacy and vigor.
These past two weeks (and continuing this week and well into next week, too) have been stacked – for the both of us – with time-intensive and labor-intensive work projects ripe with rapid changes, tight deadlines, and the near-constant need for problem solving, flexibility, and re-rerouting of visions and action steps. On its own, that’s a lot of mental gymnastics. Add to that our big and long-awaited landscaping overhaul – which is finally happening after over a year of planning and many design revisions and delays. It’s shaping into something we think we’re really going to love, but hasn’t been without quite a few hiccups, misunderstandings, weather and material delays, changes, and that ever-necessary need to keep a close eye on things, and then scrap plan A and quickly work up a plan B, C, D, E….
We’re grateful to see another journey in this process of turning our cute albeit cookie-cutter house into our own unique, comfortable, and very “us” home come to fruition, but it hasn’t been without its challenges. We’re just in the thick of it right now, in that ugly stage of the project timeline halfway through where everything is a week or more behind schedule, started but only partially completed, covered with dirt and grime and bugs and cottonwoods and pollen and bird poop, tools and materials and machines are scattered everywhere, it’s hot, and the once beautiful, lush, green lawn we’ve been cultivating for the past two years is brown and trampled and shredded from digging, dumping, heavy machines, and pallets. It’s the stage that you struggle to love, even though you know you should try to see the fun and wonder in it all because it’s only temporary and will eventually transform from a caterpillar of a yard to a butterfly of an outdoor oasis, but right now it’s relishing in those awkward teenage years, and the light at the end of the tunnel is finally visible, but still feels so far off. How’s that for using every metaphor in the book?
And along with all that detailed-brain-power-laser-focus-time-sensitive work stuff I mentioned, there’s also this part-time job of keeping up with the moves of our landscaping crew (who are all excellent guys and great workers, and we’re tremendously enjoying having them around as they work diligently on this project of many, many complicated parts), and also the work of planning, packing, and preparing for a 2.5 week road trip (our first vacation in a very long time!), that – naturally – commences right on top of all of this. Furthermore, along with the daily stream of 2-3 large landscaping trucks with trailers full of gravel and stone and top soil filling our driveway and the street in front of our house and our neighbors houses, utility and construction workers with their 4-5 big trucks (and accompanying army of backhoes and excavators) are doing a bunch of digging and installation of fiber optic cable in our neighborhood. Of course, just this week, they reached our street, so all of their trucks and machinery are simultaneously navigating the same exact area of the same exact street (right outside our house) as our landscaping crew is. And then there’s the noisy equipment and machinery for all of the digging and hauling and pounding and sawing and dumping and backing up and water pressure use that both the landscapers and the utility teams are doing…so finding one moment of precious silence between the hours of 7am-3pm, while we’re feverishly working away on those deadlines with the little mental energy we’ve been able to salvage, has been a wild ride.
While it’s certainly busy, it’s not all bad. We knew from the start that all of these journeys – diving back into these big seasonal work projects we’ve been away from for so long, major landscaping renovations, big trips – would be messy and chaotic, but wonderful and rewarding. And they are. I just don’t think we anticipated the timing working out in such a way that they all landed right on top of each other in the same one month period. We also have two lunch double dates planned and coming up this weekend (two! I know! We went 14 months without any social outings and here we have two lunch dates in the same weekend!) that we’re very much looking forward to, and also can only laugh at the timing in hindsight and take a mental note that we probably actually need them to unwind a little – its life gently nudging us to take a break.
Somehow, in spite of all these big ticket things, we’ve managed to sneak in some early summer fun. Earlier this week someone in the neighborhood scheduled a taco food truck to swing by for about two hours around dinnertime, so we were able to enjoy some excellent tacos and lovely conversations – getting to know some people in the neighborhood better – while we waited in line. I also pulled out my snowcone machine for the first time this season and had my inaugural snowcone of the summer (cherry cola). A few evenings this past week, the weather (by 6pm or so) has been glorious and so I’ve been able to take a book and a glass of wine outside on the deck after dinner to relax, read in the shade, and listen to the chirping of the birds at our feeders. We also have a nest of finches tucked away in a little alcove in the upper eaves of our front porch, in a nook that’s shaded, cool, out of the wind, and out of the sight of predators. The mom and dad finch (who frequent our oriole feeders and seem to have taken a fondness to the grape jelly and orange halves we put out) had a number of eggs in the nest, who have just recently hatched into tiny little fuzz balls. It’ll be fun to watch them grow, just as we watched the baby bunnies last summer.
Over the weekend we pulled out the awesome cornhole boards that we made last year, along with the grill, and played a few rounds of cornhole with our next door neighbors and grilled up some cheeseburgers, ears of corn, and seasoned vegetables, and we also grilled the ingredients for a massive batch of my homemade salsa – which gives it a nice, smokey char. It’s been chips and salsa for dinner multiple times in this household over the past week (usually followed by a few chapters of a book in a nice hot bath before bed – gotta unwind somehow). We celebrated National Donut Day, and also went to one of our favorite local places – a cidery with wonderful hard ciders, excellent food, and a beautiful outdoor space in the country overlooking meadows and orchards – for an evening of lovely weather and baseball-themed eats on their 1st annual Lou Gherig’s Day to raise both funds and awareness of ALS. Then, early on Sunday morning, our She-Food group held a surprise birthday breakfast for one of our friend’s. With the pandemic, we’ve done things like this so sparingly (and only outside around a campfire) that it was such a nice change to put on a sundress and gather in the same space for hugs, catching up, coffee, mimosas, cinnamon rolls, eggs and bacon, cheesy hashbrown casserole, muffins, and smoothies. One night I made the first strawberry rhubarb pie of the season (my 4 beloved rhubarb plants are positively thriving, by the way!), picked up some new books from the library on a rainy afternoon, and we watched the new Cruella movie (and loved it!).
And, lastly, a movie we’ve been looking forward to seeing for a long time now (In the Heights) whose release was delayed in 2020 is finally out, so – if we’re lucky – we’re hoping to sneak away to the drive-in movie theatre this weekend to enjoy it once it’s dark out, after a round of mini golf while splayed out under blankets in the bed of our truck beneath the stars, eating a whole lot of comforting junk food.
There’s plenty I haven’t gotten to, can’t get to, and won’t get to. I’m trying to accept that and then just let those things go, prioritize what we can accomplish right now (one task at a time), and then make sure there’s plenty of time for all these wonderful, fun, summery things, because these are the moments I want to delight in and want to spend my time and energy focusing on, while I do my best to remind myself the rest of the stuff will shake itself out.
