Anniversary

Pynchon and I were digging up our front yard this afternoon, each in our respective patch, hunched over and flinging clods of dirt toward the wheelbarrow when I thought ... hey, it was exactly one year ago that we moved in here!

So I mentioned that to him and we both stood there for a minute.

Huh.

It's an anniversary I want to celebrate, even though we didn't want to move, didn't choose to move, were in a terrible rush and under a lot of stress. It turned out okay, even though moving and renovating at the same time suck. And this house is growing on me. Certainly, the dandelions seem to find it a very healthful environment in which to develop, if I am to judge by their numbers (about 700 rudely uprooted by me so far). Munchkin, too, has grown in weedlike fashion since last spring, my little dandelion girl. She loves it here, and has memorized our address, designated the three tall cedars as "Mommy tree, girl tree .... and Daddy tree." She

Last year, surveying what 30 years of neglect can do to a yard on a 55' x 110' lot, we threw our hands over our eyes and muttered next year, next year, another massive chore to add to our list. But next year became this year and another massive chore became, actually, kind of fun.

We're putting down roots here, and the gardening or agricultural metaphor seems apt as I mentally overlay our yard with the combined 10 year vision that Pynchon and I are developing for the space, indoors and out. I begin to see why people feel this need to write about gardening: the connection to the earth is primal, and the metaphorical richness of planting, tending, weeding, and worrying for plants, the susceptibility to larger master of rain and sun, the hard fate of soil type, the possibility of emendation ... well. The applicability to questions of family life are all too clear.

Still, I'm not going to write that story, I think. Today I'll just look around and marvel at what a year can do, how a house became home, how happy I am to be here, clucking at my weeds and clutching at my lower back while Munchkin nurtures the earth worms. That's more than enough for now, I think. A year. We made it; we're making it.